On a clear July day 50 years ago, two planes over Hendersonville caught the eye of Flaughn Lamb, who was talking to a friend at a farm supply business on Seventh Avenue.

A Piedmont jetliner that had just taken off from the Asheville airport and a smaller Cessna coming in to land seemed much too close, but Lamb thought surely they would spot each other. It was a little cloudy, but overall visibility was good that day, just after noon on July 19, 1967.

"I was looking up and thinking it was looking like one would cross over in front of the other, and about that time was when they hit," said Lamb, who at 80 still runs the Orchard Trace Golf Course in Edneyville. "It was very dramatic and disastrous looking. There was maybe a four- or five-second pause and then a 'boom.' When it boomed, I called it confetti falling out from the sky — people's bodies, parts of the planes, everything, I guess."

The jetliner tried to straighten out, Lamb said, but then it tilted left and spiraled downward, followed by a second explosion. A third blast echoed through the small town when the planes slammed into the ground near Camp Pinewood, not far from Interstate 26.

Like a lot of locals, Lamb jumped in his vehicle and drove to the scene. What awaited him was a tableau he's never been able to erase from his mind.

"As I pulled up and got out, there were suitcases, clothes, body parts — you name it — it was scattered all over the road," Lamb said, remembering that he reached down and picked up a man's wristwatch, forever frozen in time at 12:17 p.m. "I just laid it back down."

Near Orrs Camp Road, in a row of hemlocks, a man of about 215 pounds had landed in a tree, still strapped in his seat.

"His head was decapitated," Lamb said. "Across the road, a body went through the roof of a house. It was just devastation. It would remind you of a landfill, if someone got hold of it and just scattered it all about. It was certainly devastating to me. I can still see it."

Emergency services personnel called in a disaster code to Pardee Memorial Hospital, anticipating mass casualties. But the hospital would receive no patients — all 79 people on the Boeing 727 died, as well as the three occupants of the Cessna 310. The Cessna disintegrated in the air, while the larger plane crashed in a wooded area between I-26 and Camp Pinewood, an event witnessed by hundreds and still ranking at the worst air disaster in Western North Carolina history.

Hundreds of public safety personnel, as well as the National Guard, responded, dousing the flames within 30 minutes, then moving on to the grim tasks of setting up a temporary morgue and reconstructing the plane debris.

In commemoration of the crash and the emergency response, the Henderson County Heritage Museum and the Henderson County Rescue Squad will hold a ceremony at 11:30 a.m. Wednesday, in front of the Historic Courthouse in downtown Hendersonville.

'Everything was charred and black'

On that July day in 1967, Ewart Ball III was a photographer for the Asheville Citizen-Times. He was talking to a co-worker in the office when a call came in about a plane crash in Hendersonville.

The week before, potential rescuers had spent several fruitless days looking for another crashed planes in the mountains, so Ball did not get too worked up about this call. But when he crested the gap near the Blue Ridge Parkway on I-26 eastbound, Ball could see the black smoke billowing skyward from the crash.

He punched the gas, arriving on scene before the flames had been extinguished.

"I got in real close to the flames and smoke," said Ball, 72. "I was walking around there, shooting, and at one point a guy grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back. It was a fireman, and he said flames were about to shoot up my back."

Ball was really shaken up by his second trip around the wreckage, especially after a gruesome realization dawned on him.

"They were laying out white sheets on bodies," Ball said. "When I got there everything was just charred and black, and every now and then you could see a finger or a foot. But when I saw all those sheets, I realized I’d been walking on those people and didn’t even realize it."

An Asheville resident, Ball can still remember the smell of burning jet fuel, scorched plane parts and singed human remains. The odor had so deeply permeated his shoes that he left them on his back porch for a month, then had to throw them away.

The memories remain equally strong for many in Hendersonville to this day, said Terry Robinson, a board member with the Henderson County Heritage Museum. He said the former head of Henderson's Emergency Medical Service is alive but declines interviews about the crash because the memories are so vivid and haunting.

"It’s one of those events that kind of earmarks time," Robinson said. "A lot of people say, 'I remember when JFK was assassinated' or when 9/11 happened. For people who saw this happen, this is that kind of event for them."

Pilot of small plane faulted

Clearing the wreckage took about three weeks, Robinson said.

After a 14-month investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board determined the probable cause of the midair collision was the Cessna 310's deviation from its flight path, which resulted in the smaller plane flying into the jetliner's airspace.

Paul Houle, author of "The Crash of Piedmont Airlines Flight 22: Completing the Record of the 1967 Midair Collision near Hendersonville, North Carolina," contends the NTSB's findings don't tell the whole story and wrongly blame the Cessna pilot. Houle will speak at the commemoration Wednesday, addressing the crash and the improvements made in airline safety as a result.

In an op-ed for the Citizen-Times in 2002, Houle noted that at the time the Asheville-Hendersonville airport did not have surveillance radar, which likely would have alerted air traffic controllers to the ill-fated planes' paths. The Cessna pilot was badly off course as he approached the airport, from which Piedmont Flight 22, heading to Virginia and then Washington, D.C., had just taken off.

The pilot of the twin-eninge Cessna, John D. Addison, "was not where he was supposed to be," Houle wrote.

"Perhaps he was not familiar with the Asheville area and had not planned properly for the flight, or maybe he misinterpreted his clearance and ignored the Air Traffic Control commands completely," Houle wrote. "No matter what happened, Addison, and his two passengers Robert E. Anderson and Ralph Reynolds, were 12 miles off course and flying right into the path of Piedmont 22."

Houle also noted the air traffic controllers had given confusing instructions, the airliner pilot had strayed from his specified course, and the plane's crew was distracted by a fire in a cockpit ashtray less than a minute before the collision. The NTSB reviewed Houle's findings but maintained the Cessna pilot was at fault.

The Piedmont pilots were experienced airmen. Captain Raymond F. Schulte, 49, the commanding officer of Flight 22, was a 30-year veteran, while his first officer, Thomas C. Conrad, 30, had logged six years with Piedmont airlines, and Flight Engineer Lawrence C. Wilson had two years, Houle wrote.

As the 727 rose and the Cessna came in for landing, disaster struck.

"The two planes collided at about 6,000 feet," Houle wrote. "The left wing of the Cessna pierced the underbelly of the 727 just behind the cockpit. The Cessna fused with the big jet and then disintegrated. All at once the jet, debris and bodies began falling from the sky onto the ground around Hendersonville."

Aftermath was equally gruesome

Collecting the bodies and identifying them fell to the FBI, along with the local National Guard unit, which secured the armory where the bodies were stored, as well as two other locations where the planes and debris were kept.

Hendersonville resident Jim Barnette, who ran an insurance and real estate company for decades, was the commander of the local National Guard unit at the time. His 115 men had to work around the clock for three weeks while FBI identification specialists conducted the gruesome job of identifying bodies, or in many cases, body parts.

Barnette said the job at the armory was particularly horrific, as so many bodies had been torn apart.

"It was a constant battle and nobody really wanted to work in there — it was a real bad image," said Barnette, 82. "I still see that image."

While the memories remain painful for Barnette and other Hendersonville residents, the way the community and its first responders handled the tragedy are still a point of pride.

"The rescue squads, the fire department, they were right on top of the scene, and everybody really cooperated," Barnette said. "That must have been a really hard job to bring those bodies out of that burning mess. But in the end, it had a real effect of bringing the community together."

Midair collision commemoration ceremony

The Henderson County Heritage Museum, with the Henderson County Rescue Squad, will conduct a ceremony at 11:30 a.m. Wednesday commemorating the 50th anniversary of the midair collision between a PIedmont Airlines jet and a Cessna private plane. The free event, which is open to the public, will take place in front of the Historic Courthouse in downtown Hendersonville. Speakers will honor the 82 lives lost in the crash, as well as the emergency response from Henderson County and Western North Carolina. Paul Houle, author of "The Crash of Piedmont Airlines Flight 22: Completing the Record of the 1967 Midair Collision near Hendersonville, North Carolina," will also speak about the crash and the improvements made in airline safety as a result. There will also be a display of historic photos from the event, video accounts from eye witnesses and a piece of fused metal from the crash.