NYC midair plane crash anniversary a solemn reminder of need for diligence to avoid disaster

It was, when it happened, the deadliest disaster in the history of commercial aviation.

Two airliners — one, from the aging propeller-driven era; the other, at the forefront of the coming jet age — in a violent collision above New York, raining twisted, torn metal, belongings and bodies down onto Staten Island, New York Harbor and, ultimately, Park Slope, Brooklyn — a terrible hail of debris that shattered what already was a cold, overcast winter morning in New York City.

It happened on Dec. 16, 1960. It left 134 dead, including six on the ground.

Thirteen Long Islanders were among those killed.

A deadly reminder

Sixty-five years later, aviation experts said, the crash remains a reminder of potential worst-case scenarios for the U.S. airline industry. Even with decades of mandated safety measures, according to the experts, a January midair collision, airport taxiway collisions, runway incursions and a shortage of air traffic controllers all point to an ongoing risk of another catastrophe without continued diligence.

The crash involved Trans World Airlines Flight 266, a piston-powered Lockheed Super Constellation carrying 39 passengers and a crew of five from Dayton, Ohio, to LaGuardia Airport, and United Airlines Flight 826, a Douglas DC-8 jet carrying 77 passengers and seven crew, from Chicago’s O’Hare to Idlewild — now Kennedy Airport.

It prompted the Federal Aviation Agency — since 1967, the Federal Aviation Administration — to institute a series of safety mandates, based on the findings of the Civil Aeronautics Board, forerunner of the National Transportation Safety Board.

"It was," Washington, D.C.-based aviation expert and former longtime NTSB investigator Jeff Guzzetti said in a phone interview last week, "a milestone event. It was one of the first accidents involving a jetliner. ... It occurred at a time when people were just getting used to airline travel.

"And," he said, "it put the fear of God into everyone out there in the public because of that."

A decade of disasters

Between 1950 and 1960 there were nearly four dozen major plane crashes worldwide, among them seven in the United States, including a June 30, 1956, midair collision over the Grand Canyon that killed 128.

Two of the other U.S. crashes involved flights at LaGuardia: one, a Feb. 1, 1957, Northeast Airlines flight that crashed onto Rikers Island on takeoff, killing 20 and injuring 78; the other, a Feb. 3, 1959, American Airlines flight from Chicago-Midway that crashed into the East River, killing 65 and injuring eight.

But, it was the December 1960 crash that set off alarm bells.

The investigation found the United crew failed to notify air traffic controllers that a ground-positioning indicator was inoperative, and the jet failed to slow entering the holding pattern. In fact, the Civil Aeronautics Board found that United 826 was traveling at 346 mph, instead of the 240 mph advised — and was 12 miles off course in rain and fog when it crashed into the TWA Super Constellation, having overshot a waypoint over Colts Neck, New Jersey.

The TWA flight broke up over Staten Island, the bulk of the wreckage spiraling down onto what was then Miller Army Air Station.

No one on the ground was injured, though one woman said it sounded "like someone dropped a thousand dishes out of the sky."

In Brooklyn, six on the ground were killed, the DC-8 crashing near Seventh Avenue and Sterling Place, setting 10 brownstones, a laundry, a funeral home and a deli ablaze — laying waste to the Pillar of Fire Pentacostal Church.

'Like a guided missile'

Accounts of the DC-8's crash noted how John Opperisano, of Massapequa, was in Park Slope visiting his nephews Joseph and Benjamin Colacino, who were selling Christmas trees on Sterling Place when the jet hit, as a witness said, "like a guided missile coming out of the sky." Benjamin Colacino had just walked down the block. He survived.

His brother and uncle were killed.

John McHugh, of Garden City, finished a business trip early, caught the United flight home from Chicago — and was killed. Jonas Rosenfield III, 18, of Roslyn, a freshman at the University of Wisconsin, was booked on a Northwest Airlines flight with two other students from Long Island, but switched to United 826. He died, too.

The lone survivor of a World War II air crash in Italy, Republic Aviation engineer Warren R. Peterson, 43, was killed on the TWA flight, headed home from a business trip in Dayton. Days afterward his wife told Newsday: "All these years, I’ve had this feeling that one of these days his end would come in a plane crash."

Percy Tierney was 4 and living in Ohio when his father, Edward, was killed aboard TWA 266.

Last week in a phone interview, Tierney, of Seattle, recalled his father was born into Dickensian poverty in London a week before the birth of Queen Elizabeth II, noting he’d survived the German blitz bombings in World War II and a stint as a British Army paratrooper, dropped into Germany in March 1945.

"He’d fought his way to Berlin, survived that, was sent to operations in Indonesia, survived that, came to the United States and built a life as an organic chemist," Tierney said. "All that, to get killed in a midair collision over New York ... One second, one way or another — and yet random coincidences happen all the time, don’t they?"

Random tragedy

Consider one of those booked on United 826 was Edmund Hillary, who with Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay became the first to summit Mount Everest in May 1953. Hillary missed the flight.

As a navigator with the Royal New Zealand Air Force, Hillary, whose wife and daughter were killed in a plane crash in Nepal in 1975, survived the crash of a U.S. built Catalina flying boat in World War II. In 1979, Hillary was to guide a sightseeing tour over Antarctica — but canceled, replaced by best friend Peter Mulgrew.

That flight, Air New Zealand 901, crashed into Mount Erebus, Antarctica, on Nov. 28, 1979.

All 257 aboard were killed.

The 1960 midair collision initially had one survivor: Stephen Baltz, an 11-year-old from Wilmette, Illinois. Thrown into a snowbank, photos showed Baltz, under an umbrella held by a Brooklyn woman, being attended by rescuers as he pleaded: "Am I going to die?" Rushed to New York Methodist Hospital, Baltz succumbed a day later to severe burns and pneumonia, his lungs scalded by fire.

The hospital still honors Baltz with a plaque that reads: "Our tribute to a brave little boy."

Jack W. Linet, then a 14-year-old from Borough Park, Brooklyn, rode his bike to the Park Slope scene shortly after the crash.

"I’d always been intrigued by airplanes and had to see it," Linet, 79, said in a phone interview last week from his home in Redlands, California. "From somewhere on Flatbush Avenue I could see the tail on Sterling Place, the only real remnant of an airplane that was recognizable. My reaction was, 'How could this happen?' "

A City College graduate, Linet later joined the U.S. Air Force — piloting a Lockheed C-141 transport during the Vietnam War. He later flew for decades as a commercial airline pilot, retiring from United.

As a pilot for National in the late 1970s, Linet also had his own near-miss — his flight almost colliding midair with a private propeller plane on final approach into Fort Lauderdale.

"I never saw it," Linet said of the other plane. "But, I heard that prop."

The sound haunts him still.

Mandating safety

After the midair collision, the FAA mandated distance-measuring equipment on commercial aircraft and issued communication guidelines for controllers handing off flights. It also mandated speed restrictions in approach patterns and strict reporting guidelines for crews faced with equipment malfunctions.

Still, in the United States, notable midair collisions followed: a 1971 crash between a Hughes Airwest passenger flight and a U.S. Marine Corps McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom fighter over the San Gabriel Mountains in Southern California that killed 50; the 1986 Aeromexico collision above Cerritos, California, that killed 64, and the 1978 Pacific Southwest Airlines collision over San Diego that killed 142.

This year, there have been two alarming and well-publicized incidents: the January midair collision over the Potomac River between a U.S. Army helicopter and a commuter flight that killed 67, and the September near-miss over Long Island between a Boston-bound Spirit Airlines flight and Air Force One.

The Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., based think tank, reported in November that the U.S. faces a severe air traffic controller shortage, with about 11,000 controllers — 3,000 fewer than needed — handling 44,000 daily flights at more than 300 centers nationwide. The FAA has pledged to hire 8,900 new controllers by 2028.

"In my opinion," Guzzetti said, "the recent Washington, D.C., midair collision was much more unforgivable than the 1960 collision over New York, because of the technology that exists, and that we knew the hazard existed for years, and they didn’t have that understanding in 1960. But, what all these incidents should tell us is we need to remain hyper-vigilant. ... Because, we still haven’t learned humans make mistakes periodically — and that we need to do everything we can to mitigate the risks."