Allyn Baum/The New York Times

This is the first in a week-long series of stories and multimedia marking the 50th anniversary of the December, 1960, air disaster in New York City.

It was the accident pilots and passengers in the still-new jet age had feared the most — a distinctly new kind of catastrophe, one that had never happened over a major urban area, one that would have seemed far less terrifying a few years earlier, when planes were smaller and slower. Two airliners feeling their way through a sloppy mess of fog and sleet collided over New York City, sending down a devastating shower of flaming wreckage.

December 16, 1960 Horror in the Sky Remembering the day when two airplanes collided over the city, and crashed in Brooklyn and Staten Island. Read more »

On a street of brownstones in Park Slope, Brooklyn — a run-down neighborhood politely described at the time as being “in transition” — one plane, a state-of-the-art jetliner, gouged long-lasting scars. The tail slammed down in an intersection. White-hot engines, smoldering cargo and badly burned bodies fell nearby. A stream of jet fuel touched off a fire that grew to seven alarms and destroyed 10 buildings and a church. Two men selling Christmas trees on a corner and a man shoveling snow were killed.

The other plane, a red-and-white icon of 1950s air travel that was powered by propellers, littered a backwater air base on Staten Island with mangled metal and luggage. A housewife near the base said she heard a noise that sounded like “a thousand dishes crashing from the sky” moments before the debris rained down.

In seconds, the disaster added several firsts to the record books, all grim. It was the first crash in the United States involving a jet with passengers on board. It was the first accident for which investigators determined a cause by relying on the flight data recorders, the so-called black boxes that planes had only recently begun to carry.

It was 50 years ago this Thursday — Dec. 16, 1960. If you look closely, the signs can still be seen around Park Slope — a row of bricks newer than the rest, a building of more recent design than those on either side. Rusty pieces of the fallen jet still sit in one man’s backyard. But in some sense it is almost a ghost disaster, one without the universally shared imagery of the Titanic or the Hindenburg, one that is, in a strange way, nearly forgotten by those who weren’t there or touched directly by it.



Of course, to those who were alive in either neighborhood, or who knew someone on either of the doomed planes, or who rushed to either scene, that day can never be erased.

“It was like nothing I’d ever heard before, and I spent four years in the service in the Korean War,” recalled William Federici, then with The Daily News, who shared an office with other reporters blocks from the crash. “It was mind boggling. We all looked at each other as if to say, ‘What the hell happened?’”

In all, 134 people died — 128 passengers and crew members and 6 people on the ground in Brooklyn.

To 21st century eyes, the city of 1960 — the city that, in seconds, became an accident scene — was recognizable, but different. The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building had reached middle age; Ebbets Field, where the Brooklyn Dodgers played until they moved to Los Angeles after the 1957 season, was being torn down. The demolition crew had decorated the wrecking ball to look like a baseball — white with red stitching. And Park Slope was a tough corner of Brooklyn, its once graceful brownstones scruffy and forlorn, many of them rooming houses.

Associated Press

The people who boarded the two New York-bound planes in the Midwest were a cross-section of travelers at a time when flying was still something of a luxury: advertising executives, sales managers, several aviation engineers who had been at a conference at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, the president of the Wesleyan University Press, seven college students on their way home for the holidays, three people who could not get tickets on an American Airlines flight that had departed minutes before the United plane. Sir Edmund Hillary, who had become the first person to scale Mount Everest seven years before, would have been on the doomed jet with them if he had not been late.

If there was any hope amid the carnage, it was Stephen Baltz, an 11-year-old passenger who landed in a snowbank, his clothes on fire. He died the next day, but is vividly remembered by those who knew him.

“He had the most infectious laugh — I can still hear it,” said his cousin Margot Quillen, who lives in St. Petersburg, Fla. “I’m looking forward to seeing Steve some day and having another giggle with him.”

He had been one of 77 passengers aboard United Flight 826, a Douglas DC-8 jetliner that, with a crew of seven, had wandered off course, apparently because of a problem with a navigational radio essential for flying in bad weather.

The jet, bound for what was then officially known as International Airport but was often called Idlewild (now John F. Kennedy International Airport), strayed into the path of Trans World Airlines Flight 266, a Lockheed Super Constellation on its way to LaGuardia Airport after stops in Ohio. It carried 39 passengers and 2 flight attendants, plus the pilot, co-pilot and flight engineer.

The T.W.A. plane was powered by the same motors as B-29 bombers in the Korean War. The United jet was one of the first of a new breed of commercial planes. With its four turbojet engines, it could cruise at 550 miles per hour, almost twice as fast as the Constellation.

Just as the jet was the way of the future, so too was television news. The crash presented a daunting first test for the medium that would dominate the 1960s. But on that wintry morning in 1960, television was slow-footed — the cameras were bulky and took time to set up. And viewers were jolted by the footage that was finally shown, hours after the crash, of firemen digging bodies out of the debris. Interviews with the victims’ grieving relatives, now as common on television as commercial breaks, were, to some, shocking.

“Barbarism,” a New York Times critic called the coverage of the crash. “Ghoulish.”

Gabe Pressman, now the senior correspondent for WNBC-TV, was one of the first on the scene. NBC’s radio station “wanted an immediate account of what had happened, and I had just gotten there seconds before,” he recalled. He saw a fire chief. “‘Anyone alive?’ He shook his head. ‘Any idea how many?’ He said, ‘No.’” And with that, Mr. Pressman went on the air.

The city mobilized nearly 2,500 rescuers — police officers, firefighters, doctors, nurses, civil defense volunteers — but at first, they did not understand the extent of the disaster they were facing. Only when the first firefighters found the tail of the jet, still in one piece with the letters spelling out “United” still plainly visible, did the horrifying scene become clear.

The tail section was at the intersection of Sterling Place and Seventh Avenue; one of the plane’s four engines had crushed a car nearby. A 25-foot section of a wing smashed through the roof of a four-story brownstone at 126 Sterling Place.

Carl Gossett/The New York Times

Much of the wreckage from the T.W.A. plane fell onto the grass runway at Miller Army Airfield in Staten Island. There were reports that a body was found in a tree nearby. But in contrast to the devastation in Brooklyn, no homes on Staten Island were damaged.

“The whole thing pancaked,” said Arthur Mazza, then a 28-year-old firefighter who was among the first on the scene, describing the plane.

The United plane had been about 12 miles off course, according to information from its flight recorder. The two planes were roughly a mile up when they collided, one of the jet’s engines slamming into the cockpit of the Constellation.

Neither plane had reported trouble. But the United plane was apparently having problems. One of the plane’s onboard receivers that tracks navigational signals malfunctioned.

That explained why the United plane did not go into the holding pattern it was supposed to and, because the pilots apparently did not know where they were, why the plane did not slow to 240 miles an hour as ordered by the controllers. It was going more than 360 miles an hour when it hit the other plane, investigators said.

“As he unkeyed his microphone, he hit the T.W.A. and cut it in half,” said Peter W. Bernhard, now 76 and living near Pittsburgh, the air traffic controller who had the last contact with the United pilot, Capt. Robert H. Sawyer. “I’ll never forget that day as long as I live.”

Some witnesses speculated that the damaged United jet was trying for an emergency landing, perhaps in Prospect Park, as it descended. But there was no evidence that the pilots remained in control. The jet fell 60 feet per second after the collision, investigators said — too fast to manage a landing, if the pilots were still alive in the cockpit.

The jet tumbled toward Park Slope. A controller in the tower at La Guardia Airport saw a blip over Brooklyn on his radar scope. Puzzled, he asked his counterparts at Idlewild if it belonged to a plane they were tracking.

The first response was no. But then Idlewild realized that it had lost contact with the United pilots, and called back: “Wait a minute, La Guardia, it could be ours.”

A moment later, the La Guardia controller frantically announced: “I think we’ve got an emergency.” And, a moment later, as the blip closed in on Park Slope: “Now, listen to this: He may have hit one of our aircraft. We’re not sure.”

Coming on Monday: Park Slope, as it was in 1960 on the eve of the crash.