The Record (Bergen County, NJ) December 17, 2003
Grim realities
SOURCE: North Jersey Media Group
Sept. 17, 1908: Lt. Thomas Selfridge becomes the first air casualty when a plane in which he is a passenger, piloted by Orville Wright, crashes during Army performance tests at Fort Myer, Va.
Sept. 7, 1909: Eugene Lefebvre dies while testing a new French-built Wright airplane. He is the first pilot to die at the controls of his craft.
May 6, 1937: Thirty-six people are killed when the Hindenburg zeppelin catches fire and crashes in Lakehurst.
July 28, 1945: A U.S. Army B-25 bomber, confronted with dense fog, smashes into the north side of the Empire State Building.The plane crash kills 14 people (11 office workers and the three crewmen) and injures 26 others.
Jan. 27,1967: A fire aboard the space capsule of Apollo I, on the ground at Cape Kennedy, Fla., kills astronauts Virgil I. Grissom, Edward H. White, and Roger Chaffee.
March 27, 1977: In the deadliest accident in aviation history, limited visibility and communications difficulties lead to the collision of two 747s on a runway in the Canary Islands. A total of 568 lives are lost, all 248 people on a KLM jet and 330 of the 396 on a Pan Am flight.
Jan. 28,1986: The space shuttle Challenger explodes 73 seconds after liftoff, killing all seven crew members: Francis R. Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Judith A. Resnick, Ronald E. McNair, Ellison S. Onizuka, Gregory B. Jarvis, and schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. A booster leak ignites the fuel, causing the explosion.
Dec. 21, 1988: Pan Am Flight 103, a Boeing 747, breaks up shortly after an explosive device, contained in a portable plastic radio in the cargo hold, detonates. The aircraft's nose separates and falls to the ground. Thirteen miles away, portions of the fuselage and wing structure hit the town of Lockerbie, Scotland. All 259 aboard the plane and 11 on the ground are killed. In 2001, Abdel Basset Al-Megrahi, a known terrorist with connections to Libyan Prime Minister Ghadafi, is convicted of carrying out the bombings.
July 17, 1996: TWA Flight 800, a Boeing 747, explodes shortly after takeoff from New York's Kennedy Airport on a flight to Paris, because of an explosion of the center fuel tank. It crashes into the Atlantic Ocean near East Moriches, N.Y. All 230 people on board are killed and the airplane is destroyed. It is the first of three major airline disasters off the Atlantic Coast in four years.
July 25, 2000: An Air France Concorde catches fire shortly after takeoff from Paris' Charles de Gaulle Airport on a charter flight to New York. The pilots lose control and the plane crashes into a hotel restaurant. The aircraft had run over a metal strip that had dropped from a Continental Airlines DC-10 during its departure, causing the tires to explode and puncture the underwing fuel tanks.
Sept. 11, 2001: In a series of orchestrated acts, two planes, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, both flying from Boston to Los Angeles, deliberately crash into the World Trade Center towers in New York City after being hijacked by terrorists. The towers are severely damaged, and collapse. Nearly 3,000 people are killed. A third plane, American Airlines Flight 77, departs Washington's Dulles International Airport and later hits the Pentagon. . United Airlines Flight 93, on a flight from Newark to San Francisco, crashes shortly after being hijacked in a remote area of Pennsylvania, reportedly after passengers and the hijackers fight for control of the plane.
Feb. 1, 2003: Space shuttle Columbia breaks up on reentering Earth's atmosphere on its way to Kennedy Space Center, killing all seven crew members: Rick D. Husband, William C. McCool, Michael P. Anderson, David M. Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, and the first Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon. Foam insulation, dislodged during launch, damages the ceramic tiles on the left wing. On reentry, hot gases enter the wing, leading to the destruction of the spacecraft.
SOURCES: NASA; warbirdalley.com; theaerodrome.com; wfu.edu; blackbirds.net; globalaircraft.org; allstar.fiu.edu; www.army.mil; pbs.org; globalsecurity.org; www.airshipsonline.com; about.com; airdisaster.com; centennialofflight.gov; sprucegoose.org; lindberghfoundation.org; goremeballoons.com; flyingmachines.org; fiddlersgreen.net; "The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Book Of Flight"; American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Inc.; "100 Years of Flight," by Bill Sweetman.
RESEARCH BY DOROTHY FERSCH, LEN IANNACCONE, MADELEINE NASH, AND PAUL WILDER / STAFF LIBRARIANS
© Copyright 2003, Bergen Record Corporation
