94 Survive Fiery Jetliner Crash at Dallas; 13 Killed (2024)

DALLAS—

A Delta Air Lines 727 jetliner with 107 people aboard nudged into the air on takeoff here Wednesday, then fell backward and hit tail first in a flaming crash that killed 13 persons, including a baby, and sent the 94 survivors, some cradling infants, scrambling across red-hot wings and fuel-soaked grass to safety.

About 60 of the survivors of the Salt Lake City-bound flight were examined by doctors, treated and released, said Delta spokesman Bill Berry. He said 34 others were hospitalized, one hurt critically and one listed in guarded condition. Fewer than 10 were seriously hurt, Berry said. The pilot, co-pilot and flight engineer lived. The pilot suffered a back injury and was in shock.

Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board, Delta Air Lines and Pratt & Whitney, which manufacturers the JT8D engines that powered the plane, converged on Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport. Jack Barker, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration, said there were reports of engine trouble. Fred H. Rollins, a Delta marketing manager in Salt Lake City, said: “There apparently was an engine problem.”

The plane, Delta Flight 1141, had taken off from Jackson, Miss., and stopped over at Dallas. It disembarked passengers and took on others, topped off its fuel tanks, then lumbered down the Dallas runway in hazy sunshine headed for Salt Lake City. At 9:03 a.m., pilot Larry Davis lifted the plane’s nose into the air. By a number of accounts, the aircraft hesitated, then began to fall.

Davis radioed the control tower, according to Joe Dealey Jr., an airport spokesman. He told United Press International that the pilot reported smoke and fire inside the plane. Davis said he would try to abort the takeoff.

The aircraft smacked into the ground and skidded across a level field at the end of the runway.

Half of the left wing and all of the right wing sheared off.

The fuselage broke open just ahead of the tail. The co*ckpit was severed from the rest of the plane, like a broken egg. One engine ripped off and tumbled through sunflowers and prairie grass. It came to rest 60 yards from the wreckage. Luggage scattered everywhere.

“I looked out the window and I saw the right wing hit the ground,” said Geoff Parkes, 37, of Miami, a passenger sitting near the starboard wing. “About six feet of the wing just broke off. Up until that point you think, ‘well, it’s your imagination.’ Then fuel spilled out, and this fireball just hit the window.

“It came shooting straight toward me.

‘Waiting for the End’

“Then we hit the ground. We were just waiting for the end. . . . I was thrown into the aisle. I stood up and could feel the ceiling heat. Then smoke filled the cabin. A passenger opened the emergency exit on the left side. And there were flames there. So he closed it again. Then another passenger opened it again and got out because there was actually a gap there . . . only about two-thirds of the wing was on fire.

“The ground was on fire. . . . I was one of the first out. By the time a minute or two had gone by, the whole wing was engulfed. We had had just enough time to get out.”

People in back of the plane were unable to get out, said Peter Wright, 37, of Dallas, a passenger ultimately bound for Yellowstone National Park. “I think that’s where the fatalities were. It was getting hot and smoky. The flames were pretty bad by that time in the back.

“There wasn’t panic. . . . Everybody was just all over the place. Chaos. Not screaming and pushing. But if you had your wits about you, you just stood up and got out.

“It happened so fast.

“We didn’t think we were going to breathe much longer. The left wing was on fire too. But if you had the choice of suffocating inside or burning on the wing, I was going to burn on the wing. I didn’t care.

‘There Was the Blue Sky’

“The door was open and there was the blue sky. . . . I jumped down . . . and right onto the grass and rolled over. The grass was on fire too, some of it.

“I was still alive. I couldn’t believe it.”

There was disagreement about how high the plane climbed before it fell.

“We didn’t get 10 feet off the ground,” Parkes said.

“We didn’t make it 50 feet in the air,” passenger Jim Hammock of Garland, Tex., told the Associated Press. “There was pandemonium. People were jumping on the plane’s wing and burning themselves on it because it was so red-hot. . . .

“You could see the fuel running down the window and down the wing.”

Another passenger, Dan Walker, said: “We got airborne about 300 feet, and then we got in trouble.”

Walker offered high praise for the way the pilot tried to level out before the plane fell.

“He did his job, and I hope and pray he’s all right,” Walker declared.

“I saw flames behind the plane, but there was not an audible explosion before the crash,” he said. He, too, saw the right wing hit the ground.

Cracks a Rib

Walker cracked a rib when the fuselage struck. He saw daylight and headed for it. Despite his injury, he stopped to help several people who were confused and frightened. The daylight was where the co*ckpit had split from the fuselage. He looked down and saw the ground about 20 feet away.

“Mother Earth looked sweet enough, so it didn’t look that far. I climbed out, and I slid down.”

He was taken to Harris Methodist-H. E. B. Hospital in nearby Bedford, where Dr. Les Derdeyn told reporters: “I think everyone is shocked at the number of people who walked off the plane. Some had a few bloodstains, and some shirts were untucked, but all in all most of them looked just fine.”

Passenger Nona Thomason, 36, a Dallas attorney, said she could feel intense heat outside her window before the plane hit.

“The next thing I knew the pilot had headed into a field, and we were bumping up and down like a roller coaster, shaking, vibrating, trying to halt this thing,” she said. “All the while I could feel the heat right outside the window. The flames were right there. It was just a matter of seconds.

“I was trying to figure out if we were going to die from an explosion, or whether we were going to die from asphyxiation, or whether we were just going to crash.

“It was pretty damn hot on row 24 from the engines (at the back of the plane).

Thought of Worst

“People got out of there with dispatch. But not panic. We had some time to think about it. The plane had gone through all this. We had time to contemplate, ‘Hey, we might just not make it through this.’

“My eyes were just burning because the smoke was so thick,” she said. “I thought we were going to die from the smoke. . . . I saw flames in my peripheral vision. I just wanted out because I knew there were scared people on board. I was afraid we were going to blow up. I just jumped, whoosh and landed on a wing.

“There were flames behind me. I got out and just ran.

“I’m tiny, pretty agile and I didn’t have any babies or anything. There were older people who couldn’t move as fast. It was scary, I mean, it was very scary.”

On the ground, witnesses said the pilot did not succeed in leveling out the plane entirely before it hit.

“To me, it was flying lower than normal,” said David Cuthbert, 51, a cabbie driving parallel with Flight 1141 as it tried to take off.

“It was laboring,” he told UPI. “It never got higher than, say, 100 feet. Then it seemed to stop in midair. Its tail dropped first. The tail hit the ground first, and 10 seconds later the thing blew up. I heard a pop, and I saw a hellacious fireball.”

Gene Metzig of Wichita Falls saw the fatal crash from a commuter flight that had just arrived and was sitting on a connecting runway.

“His right wing was coming straight at us,” Metzig told the AP. “It was probably no more than a foot or 18 inches off the ground. As he pulled it back to the left, I don’t know how the hell he missed us, but he missed us.”

Passengers on the commuter plane “were cheering this guy to get that plane off the ground,” Metzig said. “We were rooting for that pilot to get that plane up. But there was just no way.”

Once the plane struck, said Sam Thompson, 59, a passenger who had gotten on at Dallas, “within two minutes, it seemed, it was completely filled with smoke.”

“Everybody just began moving as fast as they could toward the exits. . . . You could see the fire along both sides of the wings and out the exit doors. I climbed out on the wing and then I stumbled.

“I burnt my arm because there were flames still along the wings, but it wasn’t flaming as fiercely as it had been. Then I jumped down onto the ground. It wasn’t more than about six feet, because the landing gear hadn’t come down.”

Thompson also said there was little panic inside the aircraft.

People moved in an orderly way, he said, and there was not much screaming or shouting.

“I guess we were fortunate that you go through that (safety) ritual whenever you get on a plane.”

Late Wednesday evening, Lee V. Dickinson Jr., the NTSB member in charge of investigating the crash, told reporters that the plane’s two “black boxes” had been recovered, apparently intact.

He said both of the boxes, one containing a flight data recorder and the other a co*ckpit voice recorder, were being taken to Washington D.C., for analysis.

The flight data recorder contains information about a plane’s attitude and performance in the seconds before a crash. The co*ckpit voice recorder contains conversations between the plane and the control tower as well as talk within the co*ckpit.

“We will interview the crew as soon as they are able,” Dickinson said. All three members of the Delta co*ckpit crew remained hospitalized late Wednesday night.

Wednesday’s disaster was the second fatal crash of a Delta plane at the Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport in three years. On Aug. 2, 1985, 137 people died when a Delta Lockheed L-1011 slammed into the ground at the opposite end of the airport during a thunderstorm. The NTSB said the pilot of that aircraft should not have flown into the storm--but also urged the FAA to include wind shear information in its automatic weather broadcasts.

Spate of In-Flight Mishaps

In addition to the crash at Dallas three years ago, Delta was plagued last year with a spate of in-flight mishaps, none of which have resulted in casualties.

On June 30, one of its Boeing 767s dropped to within 500 feet of the Pacific Ocean on a flight from Los Angeles to Cincinnati after the pilot inadvertently shut off both of its engines.

On July 7, one of its Boeing 737s bound for Lexington, Ky., landed by mistake at Frankfort, about 20 miles away.

Then, on July 9, a Delta L-1011 bound from London to Cincinnati strayed 60 miles off course and came within 100 feet of a Continental Airlines 747 over the Atlantic Ocean.

Staff writers David Treadwell in Atlanta, Eric Malnic in Dallas and Richard E. Meyer in Los Angeles also contributed to this story, as did researcher Edith Stanley in Atlanta.

THE CRASH OF FLIGHT 1141

Plane takes on full load of fuel, then begins take-off

Pilot reports smoke and fire inside cabin, says he is trying to abort takeoff and requests emergency assistance.

Front of plane lifts up and the craft barely rises off ground, then slides back down tail first.

Tail explodes and front fuselage slams to earth.

Half of left wing shear off and the wreckage plows about 150 across grass.

Most of the dead are in the forward area just behind the co*ckpit.

Boeing 727-200 Wing Span 108 feet Length 153 feet 2 inches Height 34 feet