Had they lived, by now they would all be in their 70s. The old men would be enjoying retirement;
puttering around with grandchildren and probably looking back at typically
American lives from the vantage point of old age. A few may have stayed in the military and
continued to serve their country, a process that would have begun for them in
November 1961. For many on the trip down
to South Carolina, this was their first plane ride. For the rest, the passage of fifty years
would by now have gently buffed away the memory of how they got to basic
training and the flight would have seemed as forgettable as a routine bus ride.
Instead, they all died in the middle of the night, in the
piney woods east of Richmond, unable to move from multiple fractures and
trapped in a burning metal tube. Instead
of living to a ripe old age, seventy-four young men died on November 8, 1961,
burned to death or dead from smoke inhalation.
It was one of this country’s worst air disasters, and it occurred in the
woods of Charles City County just a couple of miles from what is now Richmond
International Airport. Today, dense
pines have again shrouded the site. No
highway marker tells their story and no memorial marks where these young
soldiers fell.
Instead, the problem was, in aviation slang, the “nonskeds.” These were airlines, often established by
ex-Air Force personnel with war surplus aircraft, who operated without set
schedules but instead stood by in various degrees of airworthiness to serve
government demands, like a flying taxi service.
The penny-pinching non-scheduled or “nonskeds” could often outbid
regular carriers for government contracts, although it later became obvious
that this was at a terrible price.
A Lockheed Constellation of the same type that
crashed near Richmond in 1961.
This particular airplane has the markings
of the U.S. Air Force.
Imperial Airlines Flight 201/8 was a Lockheed Constellation;
a World War II vintage design with a distinctive triple tail. The “Connie” had originally been intended for
a long-range troop transport, but after the war was used as a civilian
airliner. The accident at Byrd Field was
not the first time a Constellation had fallen from the sky around Richmond: a
decade before an Eastern Airlines flight had made a crash landing without
injuries in a field at Curles Neck Farm, just to the east of Richmond, in 1951.
The last Constellation was produced in
1958 and was going out of service with the major carriers, but for the
“nonsked” airlines, with their mercenary practices and cost-cutting maintenance,
anything that would cheaply carry a large number of bodies was ideal.
One of the “nonskeds” was called Regina Cargo Airlines. Writing in a 2011 newsletter of the Virginia
Aeronautical Historical Society, historian Linda Burdette noted that Regina
Airlines was almost immediately in trouble after its establishment in 1953 when
one of its planes went down in Centralia Washington, killing 21 people. In 1959, the airline was fined for operating
an unsafe C-46 airplane with 30 Marines on board. By 1961, it had changed its name and was
operating as Imperial Airlines.
Imperial Airlines flight 201/8 was typical of a “nonsked” in
that it was hired by the Army to collect new recruits to transport them for
basic training in South Carolina. Early
on November 8, 1961, the flight began in Columbia, South Carolina and flew
north, with new soldiers getting on, first in Newark, New Jersey and more in
Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, with the last stop being Baltimore before heading
back to South Carolina.
Before they left for the airport in Newark, 28 would-be
soldiers met in the Patterson, New Jersey City Hall that morning and were
photographed for the local newspaper. They
are dressed against the New Jersey winter, in sweaters and jackets, white shoes
and loafers, and they carry small suitcases.
In the photograph a few of the faces look uncertain and thoughtful, but
the majority smile with the good cheer of young men about to embark on an
excursion. Of the twenty-eight men in
the photograph, twenty-two took the oath to join the Army. Six were rejected for various bureaucratic
reasons and returned to their homes while the rest who appeared in the
photograph boarded Imperial Airlines and were dead within hours.
A group photograph of 28 men to be inducted into
the Army, photographed hours before the crash. Of this group, six did not
board Flight 201/8 and the rest were killed near Richmond.
The young lives that had been lost in the woods of Charles
City County drew to a close with startling rapidity. Historian Burdette recounted the typical last
day of one 22-year-old from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, who was on Flight 201/8. That morning he had said goodbye to his
parents, leaving at noon. The Army
supplied box lunches for the passengers, invoking the innocence and hominess of
a high school field trip. That afternoon the young man from Bethlehem was sworn
into the United States Army. By 4:30 the
next morning his father got a phone call from a New York newspaper asking if he
knew his son was dead and asking what was his reaction to the horrific crash
that incinerated his child.
The crew of the Constellation that was Flight 201/8 was
unusual that day, and as a direct result, confusion about command and orders
given and orders rescinded were later cited as one of the main reasons the
airplane crashed. Captain Ronald Conway
and First Officer James Greenlee were of equal rank, but Conway assumed command
of the plane. When an emergency occurred over Virginia, both men seemed to be
in command and issued orders at cross-purposes that contributed to the
crash. Flight Engineer William Poythress
was training a student, who was onboard during the flight. A stewardess, Linda Johns, was the fifth
crewmember.
This
diagram shows the path Flight 201/8 took over the Richmond airport
and shows
the spot where the airplane crashed near the runway.
From
the collection of the Virginia Aviation Historical Society.
From the start, things went wrong with the supply of fuel to
the four engines of the Constellation.
The Flight Engineer corrected this by opening a fuel valve for two of
the engines, although the Captain wasn’t informed, nor were any corrective
steps taken during the subsequent stops.
While this complicated and tragic exchange was taking place in the
cockpit of the Constellation, with pilot, co-pilot and flight engineer all acting
at cross-purposes, the passengers of Flight 201/8 would have quickly sensed
something was very wrong.
The change in pitch of the four propeller engines must have
been quite noticeable inside the plane, let alone the ominous silence from one
side of the fuselage after two engines quit completely. As the pilots fought the controls for a
second pass at the runway, the lights of Byrd Field must have flashed by at a
crazy angle while the plane executed a wide, banking turn over the entire
airport, then banked again sharply to the right, out over the utter blackness
of the pines. Just before the impact,
the third of four engines stopped. There
must have been just the slightest moment of comparative quiet, followed by a scream
from the one remaining engine as it desperately accelerated, forcing the nose
of the plane up. Flight 208/1 managed to
claw its way up to 700 feet. And then it
fell into the woods below.
Dawn
on November 9, 1961, shows the distinctive tail section of the Constellation
as
one of the few recognizable parts of the plane left as the rest of the wreckage
still smolders.
A. P. Webb, a ticket agent at Byrd Field, watched the flight
of the Constellation against the cold night sky. “It started to settle,” he said, “as if it
were stalling… Suddenly the horizon lit up.
After the pinkish glow died down, a great ball of flames came up.” The plane had landed about a mile from the
airport in a low pinewood, near Charles City Road. Rescue units from the airport, National Guard
members and civilians who forced their way through the brambles and pines to
the wreckage would remember the crazy shadows cast by the trees from the
roaring fire, dancing shadows from which two men wandered.
Conway, the pilot, was of slim build and was able to wriggle
out of one of the broken cockpit windows as the rest of the plane blazed. Bill Poythress opened the door to the cabin
of the plane immediately after the crash and “heard a certain amount of noise,
like people hollering. They weren’t
hollering real loud, like 90 per cent of them were stunned and couldn’t tell
what happened. I could see figures in
the smoke and fire.” Poythress leaped
from the crew door in the fuselage and managed to run, terrified, through the
flames and scramble across the shattered and burning trees that surrounded the
crash site. He and Captain Conway were
the only ones to escape the plane, now entirely engulfed by a column of flame
that rose above the pines.
The
front page of the Richmond newspapers
reflected the shock at the loss of life
the night before.
The two men, suffering with burns and smoke inhalation, were
taken to the Medical College of Virginia.
Behind them, hundreds of the curious were making their way to the crash
site, parking along Charles City Road and pressing through the gullies and
marsh to see the site. Police with dogs
were deployed to keep the curious away, but still traffic was jammed with
parked cars for miles. Such was the
crush of sightseers, a Richmond newspaper reported, that “Thousands of would-be
spectators, halted by massive traffic jams and warnings from police, never got
near the flaming wreckage.”
As the gray dawn turned to morning, smoke hung in the trees
as the wreckage cooled to the point that the dead could be removed. From the position of the badly burned bodies,
it was obvious that many on the plane had left their seats and attempted to get
out of the airplane. The greatest number
of dead were found piled near the main cabin door, which was jammed shut from
the impact or from debris piled against the wreckage. In a horrific detail, the Medical Examiner
said many of the dead had fractures of legs and arms, perhaps as a result of
trying to claw their way out of the burning airplane. The glum conclusion was that virtually
everybody on the plane had died, not from the impact, but were instead killed
after the crash by either flames or smoke.
No safety procedures for passengers were reviewed before takeoff and apparently nobody was told about the over the wing exits that might have
saved them.
Still
dressed in his hospital pajamas and sitting beside his wife, Beverly, Pilot
Conway tries to explain to the press what happened to Flight 201/8. He
and the Flight Engineer were the only survivors of the crash.
The fate of the young soldiers was national news. Time Magazine, in particular, took an
interest in the subject of the “nonsked” airlines. After a four-week investigation by the Civil
Aeronautics Board into the crash, Time said, “…it seemed a wonder that
Imperial’s Constellation had got off the ground in the first place.” The article cited the following problems:
Pilot Conway had failed some of his flight tests, and Imperial Airlines planes regularly
had so many problems they routinely took up half the time of a Federal Aviation
Inspector in Miami who reported hydraulic leakages, faulty fuel indicators,
improper rigging of fuel mixture controls, bald tires, and fuel seeping out of
the plane and onto the ground. In
addition, Time noted the doomed plane’s fuel was contaminated with rust, that
the crews couldn’t determine the condition of the plane because the logbooks
were not up to date, and the confusion in the cockpit that lead to the loss of
the fuel-starved engines. Perhaps the revelation
most indicative of the miserable quality of airplane maintenance was that of
Chief Flight Engineer John Mayfield, who recounted not having a part for a
motor on an Imperial Airlines plane and substituted a piece taken from a 1954
Mercury automobile.
A Fort Lee honor guard stands near some of the 77 flag-draped coffins that were prepared
to be transportedt back to the home towns of
the young men killed on Flight 201/8.
The Army mortuary unit at Fort Lee began their grim task of
trying to identify the horribly burned bodies.
All were eventually returned to their relatives, with dozens of
flag-draped coffins making their way back to big cities and small towns in
Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland. Twenty-eight
of the dead were from the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania, and this was a
devastating blow to this close-knit and largely Irish area. The town of Bethlehem, in the Lehigh Valley,
is the site of the only memorial ever made to any of the victims of the crash
of Flight 201/8. There, in a park beside
a highway, a small granite marker with the simple inscription, “Dedicated to
air crash victims – U.S. Army, Nov. 8, 1961” lists the names of the fourteen
men from Bethlehem who died.
The site of the crash of Flight 201/8 is an otherwise undistinguished
patch of Virginia pine woods located about a mile from the present
day
Richmond International Airport.
The passage of fifty years has erased any sign of the crash
of Flight 201/8 in the pinewoods of Charles City County. Even the stretch of Charles City Road that
was once lined with fire engines, National Guard trucks, and the cars of the
curious who were drawn to the towering fire in the woods has been cut off by
construction of Interstate 295, and that part of the once-busy road is now a
dead end. No historical marker marks the
place where so many young men, soldiers for only hours, died horrible deaths
because of incompetence and greed. Today,
only a few aviation buffs and the relatives of the dead now recall the horror
of their useless sacrifice. They
remember all too well, as must six old men from New Jersey who couldn’t take
their oath to join the Army that November so long ago, and missed meeting an
awful fate on Imperial Airlines Flight 201/8.
- Selden.
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