1960 New York Air Disaster - Accident

Accident

At 10:21 am Eastern Time United Airlines Flight 826 advised its company radio operator that one of its VOR receivers had stopped working (although they did not notify air traffic controllers of the problem), making it harder to navigate in instrument conditions. At 10:25 am air traffic control issued a revised clearance for the flight to shorten its course to the Preston holding point (near South Amboy, New Jersey) by 12 miles (19 km). Flight 826 was supposed to circle the holding point at an altitude of 5,000 feet (1,500 m) at no more than 240 mph (390 km/h), but overshot the point. United later said the Colts Neck VOR was unreliable (pilots testified on both sides of the issue). ("Preston" was the point where airway V123 (the 050-radial off the Robbinsville VOR) crossed the Solberg 120-degree radial and the Colts Neck 346-degree radial.)

Weather was light rain and fog (which had been preceded by snowfall). According to information from Flight 826's flight recorder (the first time a "black box" had been used to provide extensive details in a crash investigation), the plane was 12 miles (19 km) off course and for 81 seconds descended 3,600 feet (1,100 m) a minute and slowed from more than 500 to 363 mph (800 to 584 km/h) when it collided with the right side of TWA Flight 266 at between 5,250 and 5,175 feet (1,600 and 1,577 m) in clouds about a mile west of Miller Field, a military airfield on Staten Island, at 10:33 am

The TWA Constellation crashed onto the northwest corner of Miller Field with some sections of the aircraft landing in New York Harbor on the Atlantic Ocean side. As it spiraled down, it disintegrated and dropped at least one passenger into a tree in nearby New Dorp.

Although witnesses speculated at the time that the crew of Flight 826 was attempting an emergency landing in Prospect Park, about 9 miles (14 km) away from the collision point, or at LaGuardia Airport, there is no evidence the pilots had control of the DC-8 at any time after the collision. The crash left the remains of the aircraft pointed southeast towards a large open field at Prospect Park, only blocks from the crash site. A Catholic high school teacher from St. Augustine High School less than two blocks from the crash, testified at government hearings that he saw the faces of the pilots as the plane approached the school, and that the wing dipped to clear the school building just before the plane crashed. This teacher's testimony was featured in a front page article and photo in the defunct NY Herald Tribune newspaper at the time of the hearings. A student at the school, who lived in one of the destroyed apartment buildings on the block of the crash site, reported to classmates that his entire family was in the only room of their apartment not destroyed by the crash and they thus survived. The crash left a trench covering most of the length of the pavement on Sterling Place in the middle of the street. It shook the school so violently that occupants thought that a bomb had gone off or the building's boiler had exploded. There was no audible voice radio contact with traffic controllers from either plane after the collision, although LaGuardia had begun tracking an incoming fast moving unidentified plane from Preston toward the LaGuardia "Flatbush" outer marker.

Flight 826 crashed into the Park Slope section of Brooklyn at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Sterling Place, scattering wreckage and setting fire to ten brownstone apartment buildings, the Pillar of Fire Church, the McCaddin Funeral Home, a Chinese laundry and a delicatessen. Six people on the ground were killed, including Wallace E. Lewis, the church’s 90-year-old caretaker; Charles Cooper, a sanitation worker who was shoveling snow; Joseph Colacino and John Opperisano, who were selling Christmas trees on the sidewalk; Dr. Jacob L. Crooks, who was out walking his dog; and Albert Layer, the owner of the butcher shop located just off Seventh Avenue on Sterling Place.