It has dawned on me that you guys must think that every trip I flew, was a disaster waiting for a place to happen! Just to set the record straight, 99% of the trips I ever flew were boring, routine trips, which would bore you guys to death to read about them. I, of course, like anyone else who flew back in the late 50's and early 60's, did have a few instances which were not normal and those are the trips which I try to recall, but sometimes, time has erased details, but I can remember the high lights of a trip and so sometimes I have to "improvise" as best I can to fill in the story and make some sense of it.
Example: I was flying a trip for a tool company in Atlanta, in a 560E Aero Commander, to St. Louis. I remember it being a spring day and 2 separate fronts lay between me and STL. On climbout, I was going through somewhere around 5,000 feet and was talking to Atlanta departure and was somewhere around Kennesaw, Ga, when departure ask me and another aircraft in the area, if we could see a DC-9, should be about my 11 O'clock, 4 miles. I was in and out of the junk running in front of that first front and didn't have good visibility so I had to report that no, couldn't see anything. I knew something was amiss because of the controllers voice in asking the question.
I knew what the discrete frequency was for the area in question, which approach control used, so I tuned up it on "com" 2 to try see what was going on. As I tuned in, I could hear the controller in that area, advising other aircraft to avoid an area around New Hope, Ga, as a Southern Airways DC-9 was disabled and making a emergency landing! I knew, being familiar with that area just West of Atlanta, there was nothing in that area which would allow a 9 to make a safe landing. Some guy in a Cessna 310 had spotted the 9 and was describing what was happening to the controller.
He said it looked like he was going to put it, the DC-9, down on hwy 92, which I was very familiar with! A chill went down my spine as I knew that someone, another pilot, with a load of people was in trouble and there was no way it could get that thing down on that narrow little road. The 310 pilot report the aircraft had crashed and a quite came over the radio. Following is a NTSB report of the accident and what had happened.
This is an actual picture of the DC-9 involved in this accident, taking off from Knoxville, Tenn, but this particular flight had started in Muscle Shoals, Ala.
PROBABLE CAUSE: "Total and unique loss of thrust from both engines while the aircraft was penetrating an area of severe thunderstorms. The loss of thrust was caused by the ingestion of massive amounts of water and hail which, in combination with thrust lever movement, induced severe stalling in and major damage to the engine compressors.
Major contributing factors include the failure of the company's dispatching system to provide the flight crew with up-to-date severe weather information pertaining to the aircraft's intended route of flight, the captain's reliance on airborne weather radar for penetration of thunderstorm areas, and limitations in the FAA's ATC system which precluded the timely dissemination of real-time hazardous weather information to the flight crew."
I believe there was a total of 61 fatalities on board the DC9 and 9 people on the ground had died. Later, as details emerged, I learned what had happened. The DC-9 had entered a area of heavy and severe thunderstorms just NW of Rome, Ga and had actually gotten through most of the stuff, when they suddenly flew into a "hail shaft", one the most dreaded weather problems that an aircraft can face. The Captain and co-pilot worked, I am sure, as hard as they could to restart the engines but no dice, so they begin to try to find a suitable place to make an emergency landing.
It is easy to look back on a aircraft accident and say, "if he had done this or that", things might have turned out differently. But in a actual emergency, you are so busy trying to resolve problems that things right in front of you doesn't register In this case, if he had realized that I-75 was right behind him when they were down to 11 or 12 thousand feet, he might could have made a landing of some kind, but the heading he was on 190 degrees, he was moving away from the inter-state HI way. They spotted hwy 92 and there was a straight area ahead, so they actually made a descending 360 degree turn to lose altitude and lined up on the road. They actually got the thing on the ground in one piece, but a telephone pole on the side of the road was clipped by the right wing and the aircraft then sled into a small grocery store on the side of the road and that is where all the ground deaths occurred.
This was a case where the flight crew had on board radar, but they don't show hail shafts, not back then, they may now, I don't know, but it was if "fate" had a hand in this accident.
I made my trip to STL ok, just had a lot of weather problems to deal with, but overall it was a normal flight!
