Which aviation incident affected you the most?

[Buckeye77]

My father was killed in a small plane crash in 1954. I had just turned 8 about 3 weeks before. There was one other man on board the aircraft, who also died.

[johngolf]

I cannot believe I did not recall this when the subject came up. In the mid 70's I was in sales for a high tech company in Columbus OH. The President/Founder was killed when he crashed his small plane. We were sold to a competitor a few months later. We all lost our jobs.

[Riley.]

September 11, 2001.

Prior to that, the Challenger explosion, which I watched in real time on TV.

[Mightyqueen801]

September 11 is the obvious. I was in One WTC when AA11 slammed into it.

Before that, though, back in the late 80s, I got up around 3 a.m. to use the bathroom and I heard a sound just like in the movies when a plane has been shot down. Then a second of silence, then an explosion.

My husband, who had fallen asleep on the couch ran toward the balcony in our apartment yelling that it sounded like a plane crash. We could hear sirens but couldn't see anything.

It was up the hill behind us. A Learjet carrying an employee of M&M Mars and his pregnant wife had crashed during a short flight across NJ. Pilot, copilot, and the couple were killed. Heard later the biggest body part they recovered was a hand.

The plane crashed on a rocky wooded spot between our apartment complex and a house, the only possible place it could have hit without hitting a building and killing anyone else. That whining sound as the plane came down stayed with me a long time.

https://aviation-safety.net/database...?id=19880524-2

[msgsing]

Living in the Midwest at the time with my parents in 1960. Our next door neighbor was flying to NYC on a business trip. He was killed when a jet and a propeller driven passenger plane collided over Brooklyn. Believe it was the worst ever airliner crash in the US up to that time. It was also the first time that black boxes were used in an aviation crash investigation. But of course 911 hit hard too.