Do you vividly remember any plane crashes? (Navy, jet, military)

[EnricoV]

Unfortunately, worldwide, I remember lots of them.

But locally, was the crash of United Airlines 173. It went down in a residential neighborhood, so that was quite memorable. Fortunately, there weren't many fatalities. I had an acquaintance who was actually on board with his family.

Also, I was in Paris the day the Concorde crashed. But not at the airport, thankfully.

[BigDGeek]

I vividly remember TWA 800. That was the day I became afraid to fly.

[Johnhw2]

The Delta L-1011 microburst crash is the one I recall most vividly. I grew up near Dallas and perhaps that is why it caught my attention more than most. Later I learned a brother in law had a ticket for that flight but made a last minute change in flights and avoided being in that crash.

[BigDGeek]

Originally Posted by Johnhw2

The Delta L-1011 microburst crash is the one I recall most vividly. I grew up near Dallas and perhaps that is why it caught my attention more than most. Later I learned a brother in law had a ticket for that flight but made a last minute change in flights and avoided being in that crash.

Oh wow; that is amazing that he changed last minute, thank g-d. I hope he doesn't have any survivor's guilt.

I remember that crash too; I didn't see the crash actually happen but I did see the wreckage at DFW in the days following. It was horrific.

[SluggoF16]

One I remember well was American Airlines 191, the Chicago DC-10 in May 1979 that crashed on takeoff when a wing engine ripped off, resulting in a leading edge flap/slat asymmetry. Someone in the terminal caught a photo of the jet in a 90-degree bank, with one engine clearly missing... eerie. I jad been doing body work on my car in prep for painting, and heard it on the radio.

A couple days later, it may have been Memorial Day, I saw several dozen general aviation aircraft of all types circling the Phoenix area in a train of sorts, paying their respects to the captain, Walter Lux, who was from the Phoenix area.

In 1980 I was the first on the scene overhead when a Cessna 152 and a Piper Warrior collided doing, of all things, a dogfight type maneuver. 4 fellow college students dead, two aircraft lost, and a whole lot of what-ifs that followed.

[2nd trick op]

The US Air crash in Pittsburgh in late August of 1994; I went to Penn State, which lost eight alumni on that flight, and knew that the wife of one of my fraternity brothers made regular use of it to commute from her Pittsburgh base to a branch office in Chicago.

I was on vacation that week -- I don't fly unless absolutely necessary, so had just arrived in Minneapolis on a Greyhound from Omaha when I saw the newspapers. After a few hours, I was able to learn from US Air that her name wasn't on the manifest.

But one inconsistent memory survives to this day. One of the institutions in Minneapolis has a carillion. and apparently, an "open keyboard" policy at lunch hour. Whomever had reserved it that Friday had a fondness for the tune "Never on Sunday", but had trouble with some of the chords, hesitating and repeating the insecurity several times.

Just a lighter-hearted incident linked forever in my mind to a tragedy which, while saddening us all, didn't become personal.

[WyoNewk]

I've had a number of friends and acquaintances die in different small planes. Naturally they all bothered me, but it's no different than losing a friend in a car crash. The majority of them only involved one or two people.

I think the first plane crash to have an affect on me happened when I was a fairly young child. It was a military aircraft that crashed not far from our farm in Kansas. All onboard perished. (I'm thinking it was a mid-air collision.) We drove over and looked at the wreckage, strewn over a section or so of land -- small pieces scattered here and there. I still remember hearing about one of the occupants being found in a corn field, impacted a couple feet deep into the soil.

Then there was a commuter aircraft that collided with a plane filled with skydivers near Ft Collins in the early 80s killing all onboard. The commuter was a direct flight from Denver to our small city (Gillette, WY, population at the time 12K). I think 9 or 10 local residents were killed, so it was a shock to the community.

My daughter's husband was originally booked on United Airlines Flight 93 that flew into the ground in PA on 9-11. He's an architect employed by the federal prison system, and he took that same flight every other Tuesday from DC to San Francisco to oversee construction of a prison going up there. Luckily, some problem came up the previous week at the construction site and he had to make an unscheduled early flight, so he pushed his remaining flight schedule back a week. That was scary.

[pekemom]

PSA 182 San Diego 1978....We lived in an area outside San Diego, El Cajon. I heard a sound like an explosion..
It was one of the most horrific crashes ever....At first the TV showed the crash area, you could make out
torsos and body parts...later they had all the remains covered with sheets...I remember watching the news
and connecting the sound I'd heard earlier with the report of what happened.

[greg42]

I don't know about anything that truly shook me, but the footage of Air Florida is burned into my brain pretty vividly. I was about 11 years old and I'm pretty sure I was glued in front of a TV seeing some live footage. At the time I lived where we received local DC television stations so it was heavily in the news locally not just as national news. I just looked up that it was midweek, but it was in the afternoon so I would have been home by then.

Dunno North Beach, that would probably shake me if I was originally scheduled to be on a flight that crashed....

[intelfan11315]

While it's not exactly a plane crash, one thing I remember vividly is the airplane that was circling above the airport for a long time because the landing gear would not go down and they had to land without it.

I don't remember the details or airports because I was too young to know or be interested in airplanes at the time.