Remembering 1960 air disaster over NYC

Ross McHugh's dad died 50 years ago Thursday morning, on a Thursday shortly after 10:33 a.m., when the plane he was in collided with another a mile high in the New York sky.

It was the first commercial air disaster of the jet age, killing all 128 passengers and six more people on the ground. Thirteen of the dead were Long Islanders.

The TWA Constellation, out of Dayton, Ohio, and bound for LaGuardia Airport, broke apart in midair and plummeted into an open field in Staten Island. A woman who lived nearby told Newsday at the time it sounded "like someone dropped a thousand dishes out of the sky."

The United Airlines DC-8 jet out of Chicago, bound for Idlewild Airport, now Kennedy Airport, caught fire and hurtled into Brooklyn at an initial rate of 733 feet per second. "I saw something that looked like a guided missile coming out of the sky," said a witness who was out for a walk. The plane sliced through a church, a funeral home and 10 brownstones before sliding to a stop on Seventh Avenue.

That was the plane carrying John McHugh.

He was 52, the jovial patriarch of a Garden City clan that included three sons and two granddaughters, girls recently born to Ross and his wife, Jean.

Investigators ultimately determined United 826 had gone too late into its holding pattern, and neither its crew nor air traffic control knew exactly where it was. They agreed this was an accident with many contributing factors, ranging from bad weather to malfunctioning equipment that contributed to crew error.

John McHugh worked at the time as a sales manager for the Amplex Corp., which made streetlights, among other things. But he had owned his own small factory during World War II and was contemplating buying a new one with a partner to make mercury vapor lights, said his son in a phone interview.

Ross McHugh was 32 at the time of the crash, a salesman in Queens when he got word that his father might have been on the plane. Within hours, rumor hardened into fact.

His brother Brooke was 21, waiting at Idlewild for a plane that never arrived. His brother Gary was 13 and in class, initially unworried because he was convinced his dad wasn't coming for another day.

" 'Your father's dead,' " Ross McHugh remembers his mother saying to Gary when he got home from school. "Gary didn't say anything. He just went upstairs to his room."

Christmas at the McHugh house was normally a festive affair.

That year they went to a family friend's house. "We went through the motions," McHugh said. "We had drinks, tried to make small talk. We were all kind of in a fog."

McHugh is 81 now. His mother is gone, as are his brothers. Looking back, he considers himself almost lucky. At least he had his wife to lean on: Gary was just a teenager, and Brooke had to wait at the airport where, as word of what happened got around, "They herded all the families into a room, all the people screaming and crying."

A memorial to the dead will be dedicated in Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery Thursday, but McHugh has no plans to attend. Instead, he will celebrate a Mass for his parents.

Over the years, he said, he has often thought of a boy named Stephen Baltz, an 11-year-old who was thrown clear of United Flight 826 when it crashed and lived for two more days.

"I was always hoping I'd get to talk him - 'Did you happen to see my father?' - but I bet a lot of people were. I guess the best thing is to let it go," he said. "Move on."