At 8:47 and a half, Sandra, a recently married 24 year old flight
attendant, told the passengers to get
ready to land in a few minutes. But the plane would meet the earth in only seconds,
almost four miles short of the runway. The captain and co-pilot would realize their
mistake just 3 seconds before their
lives ended.
Much too low, Flight 405 continued to descend through the night, rushing forward at almost
200 miles an hour. It
swooped down over the Normanskill Golf Club, then above New Scotland Avenue and St. Peter’s
Hospital, where some of the injured and
dying would arrive in less than an hour.
As the small urban pond known as Buckingham Lake rose like the moon up from the plane’s port side wing tip and the maple branches below began to feel the bite of the
churning propellers, Flight 405….a 45,000
pound behemoth of aluminum and steel and
gears and cables and wires and grandmas and fathers and Moms and sons and
daughters and sweethearts … with an awful tearing screech and chest-pressing
thud, slammed into 50 Edgewood Avenue at Albany, NY.
The plane hit low enough to dig out its own
cellar, had one not existed, and the house collapsed on top of the wreckage. Nothing exploded or caught fire. Fuel doesn’t readily burn; the vapors do, but
an outdoor temperature of 13 degrees Fahrenheit that night minimized any vaporization. The fuel-laden right wing separated from the
plane but miraculously remained intact, even though enough aviation fuel leaked
out to turn the crash site into a potential inferno. All of the injuries were from the plane’s impact.
Passengers were catapulted to the front of the plane and into the
forward cargo compartment. Such G forces
can cause irreparable damage to a body’s organs. In some air crashes, victims’ hearts have burst
out of their chests. Cargo disintegrates. In the case of Flight 405, passengers were hurled
forward like human cannon balls, along with their seats, smashing into luggage
and freight. Only one of the plane’s
occupants got out on his own and he didn’t remember how. The rest, dead or alive, had
to be pried out.
According to the NTSB report, Accident Investigation
Report NTSB-AAR-73-08, complete with
charts, photos and maps, (ignore the
Wiki entry on the web; it is far too forgiving of the pilots) the plane’s crash into the very bottom of the house was extremely fortunate
for the nearby homes. Frankly, it was incredible
no fire erupted and only one house was obliterated in the densely built-up neighborhood.
Most of the houses were only twenty five
feet apart. Of course, it was miraculous
Sandra and 31 of the passengers lived. Likewise, 5 out of 6
in
the house survived. The family of four watching “The Partridge Family” on television was
spared any serious injuries, even though the parents were blown out through the family room window and landed in a side
yard as the plane ripped into an adjacent room.
In the tossed up wreckage of the home, their two young sons were found
in a closet, just beneath a pool of leaking jet fuel.
A man out walking his dog reported the plane
came in over the neighborhood and at the last second dipped its left wing, catching
it in the street. The man stood in shock as the plane slammed into the ground,
just where the street rises up a small hill to 50 Edgewood Ave. The left wing
disintegrated. The fuselage shot through No. 50’s living room to the basement
and the fuel-laden right wing, still attached to the plane, flopped over on the
next lot, No. 54, where a tree stopped it from sliding into the backs of homes
on the next street. There was no house at No. 54. Thirty-five years later there
is still none. If you look at Google Maps, it is the only empty lot anywhere in
the area. Had a home existed at No. 54, it would have been hit broadside with a
wing full of aviation fuel.
A graduate student in an upstairs apartment of No.
50 was in the shower when the plane swooped down out of the sky and took his
life. His young wife, Hannah, the friend
of a woman with whom I worked in Syracuse, was watching television in the next
room. She remembered nothing about the
moment of impact except for the loudest sound she had heard in her life and the
last one she would hear for a
while. The world turned upside
down and the lights went out and. She found
herself in a pile of rubble, ears ringing and hurting terribly, her bathrobe up
under her armpits and caught on debris so at first she couldn’t stand up. The smell of what she thought was kerosene
almost overpowered her.
Suddenly cold in the frigid March air, she
decided their house had blown up and she had landed down the block. Hannah threw off a piece of furniture and began
to walk home before she realized she was already there. The street was quiet. Deaf from the crash, she couldn’t hear
anything anyway. She began to look for
Peter, her husband. As the moments
ticked by, neighbors came out of their homes and soon the street was crawling
with police, firemen and even a reporter with a backpack and a microphone down
at the end of the block. With the strong
stench of aviation fuel permeating the scene, firemen worked frantically to
free the survivors and to suppress their own personal terror of an instant
immolation had the fuel ignited.
Survivors were rushed to area hospitals. In 1980 I met a man who tirelessly worked
through the night to comfort the injured and their relatives and friends who
searched the hospitals for their loved ones.
He was the pastor of the Reformed Church near St. Peter’s Hospital at
the time. Bruce and I are old friends
today and we sometimes talk about his experience that night and my own from a
different time. This story brings
inquires from time to time and a passenger on the plane wrote me not long ago looking
for the minister who had attended his parents that night as their family shook
with the tragedy of the death of a sibling he had been flying
with in the wreckage I was able to connect the man with
Bruce.
Less happy was a reader who wrote to say she was
related to the Captain and that he should have been portrayed as a hero. I had to respond that I published only what I
read in the NTSB report. I offered to
consider an addendum to the story with a
paragraph written by her, but she never responded.
Not long ago, I parked my car on Edgewood Avenue, got out and looked
around. It’s a quiet street just south
of Washington Avenue and not far from the University of Albany’s campus, where my daughter
spent four years in the late 1980’s.
The demolished house has been replaced.
I felt a bit self-conscious, knowing adults seldom walk around anymore on a residential street in
the middle of a weekday afternoon.
How strange it was to hear the birds chirp and
an airplane pass overhead as if nothing unusual had ever happened in this
neighborhood of families and students. I looked around at the well-kept homes and
wondered if any of the people living in them today were here on that night in
1972. Had an airliner landed on my
street, I would have moved out and never looked back.
I got back in my car and sat for another five
minutes. I wanted to pray, or somehow
offer condolences … or something.
Probably, I wanted to know this couldn’t happen again. But tragedies happen every day, when and
where we least expect them. On a bright
and sunny afternoon or a sleepy winter evening as the snow falls gently on the
neighborhood.
Copyright 2010, 2015 by
David Griffin
There have been two
Flight 405 accidents in the United States. In March of 1992, US Air, the successor to Mohawk Airlines, crashed another
Flight 405 into Flushing Bay at LaGuardia Airport in New York
City. The plane stalled on take off because of wing
icing.
The Windswept Press
Murrells Inlet, South Carolina
www.windsweptpress.com
