Unraveling the crash of Flight 11

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Forty-three years ago a Boeing 707 passenger jet exploded in the air above the Missouri-Iowa border. The disaster took away 45 lives. In the aftermath it became clear those men and women died in an act of what might be called domestic terrorism.

Although long forgotten in the community's memory, the tragedy of Continental Airlines Flight 11, bound for Kansas City from Chicago, left a significant legacy. For one thing, it led eventually to increased air travel security. For another, it spawned a book, a movie and pop culture's appetite for tales of disaster.

Few people know of this odd slice of history. Those who do still don't understand why it happened.

In Chicago, Keith Wilson Jr. and his wife ran to catch Flight 11, their connection to Kansas City.

Wilson, an Independence, Mo., attorney and city counselor of Kansas City, was angry at his wife, Virginia, as they ran toward the plane. She liked to primp. She'd taken her time applying makeup in the airport bathroom. Why did she always have to make them late?

It was the Midwest in May, and a strong storm cell churned eastward across Iowa and toward the southwesterly path the Boeing 707 would take to Kansas City.

Among the 37 passengers and eight crew members on this Tuesday evening in 1962 were top executives from Michigan auto companies and other corporations. There was an Army private based at Fort Riley and a scholar from Duke University. Eight passengers lived in the Kansas City area. Four were headed back to smaller Kansas towns.

All the passengers were men, except for Geneva Fraley, a 32-year-old sales representative for a Kansas City company. She was traveling with Thomas Doty of Merriam, Kan., her partner in a gift business they were about to launch.

Capt. Fred Gray, 50, guided the 707 down the runway and into the air just as the U.S. Weather Bureau issued a severe weather warning.

To accommodate, the crew set their controls for a higher than normal altitude. At 39,000 feet, flight time to Kansas City would be just over an hour.

At just after 9 p.m., they asked air traffic control in Chicago for coordinates of the storm. Chicago's radar didn't reach that far, so controls at Waverly in northwest Iowa took over. With Waverly's help, the crew managed to get around the storm with moderate turbulence.

To Waverly, Flight 11 said: "We're starting a turn. Requesting clearance direct to Kansas City."

Thomas Doty rose from his seat, walked to the back of the plane and entered the lavatory. His hands might have been shaking. His thoughts might have been racing. But if he had doubts about his plan, they weren't enough to stop him.

As Flight 11 took off in Chicago, Joanne Horn was washing clothes at her home in Independence, Mo. Her husband, Dale, would be home soon, and she wanted the chores done.

Dale's successful business meeting in Chicago meant a promotion and a move for the Horns. Joanne didn't want to leave her family, but she was trying to be supportive of his fast-moving career at Emery Air Freight.

Joanne finished cleaning and headed to bed. She couldn't stay awake for Dale's plane to arrive, for him to collect his car and then to stop by the office for his mail.

It had been a long day. She had spent hours rehearsing with her 1-year-old daughter a greeting for Dale:

The air traffic controller in Waverly had trouble transferring Flight 11's radio signal to the Kansas City center.

Then, as usually would happen, Flight 11 moved out of his radar's range and off his screen. For a moment the controller in Kansas City thought he saw a blip on his radar screen. It showed up in three sweeps, and then the object was gone. It was 9:17 p.m., at which time the plane's flight recorder became extremely active.

First to go was the rear 38 feet of aft and aluminum fuselage, including the lavatory. Doty, flight attendant Joyce Rush and six other passengers were sucked into the cold air 37,000 feet above the ground.

The plane immediately decompressed, and fog filled the cabin. With a full one-fourth of the jet's length missing, the nose pitched downward. More pieces of the plane broke off, some intentionally. To mitigate fire in emergency landings, the Pratt and Whitney engines were designed to detach during rapid descents. All four jet engines dropped, plowing in succession into the earth below. The flight crew might not have known how much of the plane was missing. Even if they had, no matter how bleak the situation, pilots always try to land their craft. Gray pulled out the emergency checklist.

At 9:21, six minutes after last contact with air traffic control, the remaining 107 feet of the plane dropped nose down in a grassy field about six miles northwest of Unionville, Mo., three miles from the Iowa border. Gray and his first officer, Edward Sullivan, were still clutching the controls.

Above Kirksville, Mo., the pilot of a B-47 out of Forbes Air Force Base in Kansas spotted a flash of light to the north. On the ground, people reported hearing thunder and seeing a ball of fire. The sky was cloudless.

Dewey Ballard was on accident duty for the Federal Aviation Administration in Kansas City when the call came from the airport at 10:02 p.m. Flight 11 was 24 minutes overdue and missing from radar. The retired aviator and World War II veteran needed to know nothing else. A 707 doesn't just disappear.

It took a couple of hours for Ballard to collect a crew of about a dozen people and head to the scene.

Meanwhile, remnants of the airplane were being found far from the Unionville field. At 10:15 p.m., a couple of men brought large pieces of twisted metal to the sheriff's office in Centerville, Iowa. A few miles away, in Cincinnati, Iowa, someone found the lavatory door. It was splattered with blood. They recognized the Continental eagle emblem. Someone else found sandwiches. Pillows and napkins. A 30-foot section of an airplane wing.

Eugene Ritter, a physician in Centerville who was a volunteer FAA medical examiner, was alerted and went looking for the crash site. He knew how important it was to have untainted evidence and how souvenir hunters could cart off pieces of wreckage.

At 2 a.m. the son-in-law of a Unionville farmer, still up from a night out, came across the body of the jet lying on its belly in a muddy pasture of the family's farm. It was missing its nose and tail and most of the wings. He ran to the house and dialed for help.

Takehiko Nakano, a 27-year-old engineer from suburban Chicago, lay alive in the wreckage, undetected.

When Ballard and his crew arrived in the area, they weren't sure where the crash site was, but they found a trail of torn, twisted metal. The array of debris suggested a direction to follow. They walked through the night, passing metal shards and bloody airplane blankets. The first body they came across was a man's, lying face up in the grass. His eyes were open, and he had nothing on but an ID bracelet and socks. The name on the bracelet was Doty's.

At sunrise Ballard walked up a hill about five miles northwest of Unionville. At the crest, he looked onto a crowd of police, medics and bystanders surrounding a mess of metal and bodies.

Passengers and flight attendants were piled toward the front of the plane. The nose dug into the ground at a 20-degree angle.

In the cockpit were the captain, first officer and second officer. Three smoke masks lay nearby, the face plates destroyed and oxygen hoses torn. The masks were covered with blood and facial tissue.

When the rescuers arrived, they assumed everyone was dead. At 5:15 a.m. they found Nakano. He was responsive. They tried to talk to him to find out what happened, but he went into shock. He died an hour and a half later from internal injuries.

That morning's newspapers in Chicago, Los Angeles and Kansas City speculated about an electrical storm or a tornado. The Los Angeles paper said two planes might have collided. The Star wrote of a jet "wrenched apart in the air by a squall line of fearful intensity." Ballard first thought the thunderstorm might have made the plane "disintegrate in midair," but the investigation continued.

The Putnam County coroner operated a makeshift morgue out of an unused barn. The FAA crew collected airplane parts and reconstructed the plane at the county fairgrounds. Troops from the Missouri and Iowa national guards and Fort Leonard Wood stood watch over the wreckage.

Someone on Ballard's crew noticed a smell like the smoke from fireworks coming from some of the airplane pieces. They began to suspect sabotage and summoned the FBI.

Back in Kansas City, a woman called local authorities. She said her husband had been on the plane. Weeks before, she had found dynamite in the trunk of his car. She thought she knew what had happened.

Thomas Doty had been an honor student in high school and then at the University of Missouri.

An acquaintance from Westport High School remembered Doty urinating in public for shock value.

He would say things like, "If I don't make my first million by 35, I'll kill myself." Sometimes he mentioned taking others with him. Doty was 34.

But lately things had gotten worse. Despite his new business venture with Fraley - Gracious Homes Inc. - Doty had suffered a series of financial setbacks. A company he had founded that made fiberglass burial vaults had gone belly-up, and he had just been ordered to turn over his patents and other assets. That spring, while working as a sales manager for Luzier Inc., a cosmetics firm, he was forced to quit or be fired. He had been branded a know-it-all and a lady's man.

He was drinking heavily, exacerbating the diabetes he had had since childhood. Doty's doctors in Kansas City thought him capable of violence.

Flight attendant Joyce Rush had been standing outside the bathroom door when Doty apparently lit the fuse. Investigators in Washington theorized that the serial numbers from the dynamite might be found in her body.

The autopsy was fruitful. A tiny piece of wax paper eventually was linked to one of six beige dynamite cylinders Doty had purchased a month earlier. The explosives had cost him 29 cents a stick.

Two days before the flight Doty bought a new Ford Fairlane at Mission Motor Sales. He insisted on life insurance to pay off the car in case of death. The salesman thought that odd at the time.

Then he picked up a $75,000 life insurance policy for $2.50 available to cautious passengers at the airport gate. All told, Doty had paid for policies worth $300,000.

The insurance company subsequently sued her and argued the policy was void because Doty had planned his suicide before he signed. In the end she received a refund that came to $12.50.

Doty's widow is still alive. Forty-three years later she declined to speak about her late husband.

Neither the FBI nor the Civil Aviation Board, which investigated the crash, would officially rule that Doty was responsible. Although it was his dynamite, and his was one of seven badly damaged bodies found far from the crash site, they never publicly said it was he who put the dynamite in the lavatory.

In the lawsuits that followed the crash, the character references of Thomas Doty painted a picture of a troubled man.

Court documents indicate that a few weeks before, a man identified as Doty slugged a woman with a pistol while she was waiting at a stoplight. He pushed her aside and took the driver's seat. Then he stopped the car in front of the Colonial Motel, took the woman's purse and jumped out. Two men chased Doty down and wrestled away his gun.

Police charged Doty with assault and theft. His court date was set for May 25, three days after the crash.

Lawyers later argued Doty's crime was irrational. They said he was capable of other irrational acts, like bombing an airplane. One poker buddy quoted Doty as saying, "The insurance business is a gag, and a person could get rich off of it."

In the days following the crash, Life magazine wanted to photograph Joanne Horn and the kids. She agreed. She dressed them up, put on her lipstick and posed. A young mother with babies who had not yet been told their father was gone.

The photos were never printed. One week later an Air France plane about to leave Paris' d'Orly airport skidded off the runway, killing 121 and bumping the Unionville crash from the pages of Life.

Months later Joanne received a package in the mail with the photos. She framed the best two and glued a ribbon of lace around the frames.

The last thing 4-year-old Kevin Horn had heard was his dad went somewhere on an airplane. When his mother told him the news a couple of weeks later, she said Daddy's gone to heaven. He replied, on an airplane?

Later Joanne saw Kevin lifting his dad's gas can toward the sky at a passing airplane.

In the deposition of an FBI agent, it was made clear that the FBI did not have technology available to screen passengers for bombs. In 1960 the FBI conducted a survey on how luggage could be scanned for commercial flights. The use of X-rays had been discussed.

Airport security eventually got more attention, especially after multiple hijackings of aircraft by foreign terrorists in the late 1960s. And after Sept. 11, 2001, it became even more intense and widespread.

Continental Airlines has no record of the case, a spokesman said. Ten families of passengers on the plane sued the airline for negligence. Continental said it followed government safety regulations and claimed it couldn't have prevented the tragedy. The cases settled out of court two years after the crash.

Keith Wilson doesn't dwell on it. He lived to tell his daughter about the flight that almost orphaned her. His wife, whose primping saved his life, passed away in 1981 from cancer. Wilson was named twice as Independence city manager and went on to have a successful law career. The way Wilson looks at it, things like missed flights just happen when you travel a lot.

Once a plane he should have been on in Mexico ran out of gas. And he was in Cuba the night Fidel Castro took over. Today Wilson lives with his daughter in Colorado.

Few people realize that the crash of Flight 11 spawned the disaster genre of books and movies.

British-Canadian author Arthur Hailey based his 1968 best-selling novel "Airport" on Flight 11.

In the book, later transformed into a movie, a madman clutches a bag while stewardesses try to pry it away. He sets off a bomb in the bathroom and is swept out of the plane.

A stewardess (with whom the pilot is having an affair) is standing outside the bathroom and is injured. She is pregnant, the pilot reveals, and he seeks immediate help for her. Despite a blizzard and the missing aft, the plane lands safely.

Hailey died in the Bahamas last year. Knight Ridder correspondent Steve Paul contributed to this report.

"Neither the FBI nor the Civil Aviation Board, which investigated the crash, would officially rule that Doty was responsible. Although it was his dynamite, and his was one of seven badly damaged bodies found far from the crash site, they never publicly said it was he who put the dynamite in the lavatory."

Does TWA 800 come to mind?

Can anyone confirm the statement that the "engines were designed to come off during high speed descents.." I never heard of that..

2 posted on 01/12/2006 5:13:54 AM PST by ken5050 (Ann Coulter needs to have children ASAP to pass on her gene pool....any volunteers?)

I was in the 8th grade, living in southern Iowa when this happened.

3 posted on 01/12/2006 6:38:49 AM PST by Eric in the Ozarks (Don't buy Bose. Their warranty is no good.)

Fascinating and indeed a piece of forgotten history. I did think about the movie based on 'Airport' when I was reading this account. Thanks for relating this - quite interesting.

4 posted on 01/12/2006 11:41:12 AM PST by SES1066 (Cycling to conserve, Conservative to save, Saving to Retire, will Retire to Cycle.)

Those jet engines are designed in a way to come off so that they won't do any damage to any other part of the plane. They are supposed to break free up and over the wing. But, there is no way to do that intentionally.

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