The Grand Canyon Mid-Air Disaster of 1956 | Episode 49

There's a lot to hate about flying, and one of the biggest complaints has always been fellow passengers, But the biggest complaint in this episode will be passengers from a competing airline. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday, History's most dangerous podcast. Together, we're going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bazaar and on inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, we'll be visiting America's most homicidal National Park. You will learn the early forensic value of carbonized smears of paint and metal, and we'll see what happens to the body during in rafter cartoonish levels of impact violence. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating or even in mixed company, But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses and lights. Begin. We've traveled an awful lot on this show, and together we've seen some of the most beautiful and remote parts of the world, and in this tradition. On today's show, we're visiting a part of the world singularly unique for its beauty and remoteness. Let me describe it like this. What I think makes us humans unique amongst all other species is that once we invented photography, actually arguably back to when we were still scrawling mastodons on cave walls, we became the only species on the planet to capture and preserve moments in time. And for the last two hundred years, we have photographed and preserved every angle of our planet and beyond, meaning space and the bottom of the ocean. We created a kind of visual time travel, and I think that makes photography one of the most important milestones in human evolution, every bit as important as faster than foot travel or even the Internet. But of all the photos captured throughout history, no one single photo has ever ever been able to encapsulate the vast beauty of the Grand Canyon in northern Arizona. Writers have taken a stab at describing it, they usually get stuck on words like mysterious or overpowering. Simply put, the Grand Canyon is a massive, colorful, and deeply carved, steep sided gorge that was etched out over millions of years by the Colorado River that today is one of the most iconic and breathtaking natural wonders in the world. Exposed rock formations set against seeming endlessness attracts millions of visitors each year, and it's a very popular destination for hikers and rafters and you know, outdoor enthusiasts. But the vast majority of visitors get to the rim and they just stare and not to bring things down, but about a dozen to them each year visit the bottom unintentionally. Oh, when you visit it, you feel like you're there in the before times. Before they was decided that this is way too dangerous for people to visit, and they just end up fencing off the whole thing, all twenty six hundred miles or forty two hundred kilometers of it. Yeah, it sounds like a lot with all the twists and the side canyons. Walking the full perimeter would take longer than walking from La to New York. The Grand Canyon Village on the South Room and the North Rim Lodge are only about ten miles or sixteen kilometers apart, but they drive from one to the other takes about five hours all the way Back in eighteen sixty nine, John Powell and a team of adventurers nearly died every day for four months straight surveying and mapping the length of the Grand Camp. I read a very good book about this last summer, and in summary, Powell's takeaway was that it was hands down the most dangerous and life threatening place in the world, and that a million poets and painters sitting in front of a million typewriters and easels could never fully capture or recreate its splendor. The valley itself is two hundred and seventy seven miles or about four hundred and forty five kilometers long, and less people have travel its length than have visited the Moon. The Grand Canyon National Park itself is bigger than Rhode Island, and Ron Swanson of Pawnee, Indiana once described it as the only place worth crying, except other than maybe a funeral. The valley has been eroded and shaped by the Colorado River for as long as seventy million years, depending on who you ask about it. The river is on average only about three hundred feet across, which is amazing when you consider that the canyon gets to be over a mile deep, and at the widest point is eighteen miles or about thirty kilometers across the canyon as a whole takes up a whopping nineteen hundred square miles or forty nine hundred square kilometers. It is a beast, but before we get to see it, we've got to get there. Air travel am i right, long lines at security, endless flight delays, oversold seats, fees for everything. And that's just the airport. Unruly passengers, cramped seats, abused flight crews, feet on the armrests, screaming toddlers, emotional support chickens. Whether you're waiting impatiently to board or being dragged off bloody and unconscious like some doctor, the art of travel has lost a lot of its polish. In March of twenty fifteen, passengers on a British Airways flight to Dubai had to return to the airport only thirty minutes after takeoff and face a fifteen hour delay because someone left a quote smelly pooh in the toilet. And if you think that flying is uncomfortable now, airlines have been discussing the usability of standing and Doubledecker asked to face style seating to create that real cattle car esthetic. But that's not the experience we're here for. No. Today, we are heading back in time to the golden age of flying. Ah Yes, flying in the nineteen fifties and sixties was different. It was a gentler, more congenial experience. Imagine stretching out your legs from a plush, wide seat comfortable enough to double as a sleeper. Imagine the smiling faces of flight crew and fellow passengers. Imagine pre prepared gourmet meals served on actual china with cutlery, no, not even cutlery silverware. Imagine offers of bottomless drinks and cigarettes instead of a mini bag full of dry pretzels. Ah Yes, air travel was still new. Passengers dress to the nines, and they didn't have to get hog tied or duct taped to their seed after some fit of air rage. It wasn't all champagne and flight attendant makeouts. Air travel was way more dangerous than it is today. I mean, yes, you were trapped in a can full of cigarette smoke, but more than that, At least a half dozen crashes a year was not uncommon. Unlike modern aircraft, older planes typically exploded in a flurry of flaming debris, making them way more lethal. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Today's story takes place on the thirtieth of June nineteen fifty six, another beautiful, bright, sunny day in Los Angeles, California. But what are we doing in Los Angeles? Like leaving? Of course? That's right. Welcome to the Los Angeles International Airport, or LAX for short. Maybe you heard of it. It always sits handily in the list of the top ten busiest airports in the world. And it's kind of hard to miss with a giant Jetson's inspired future retro look and main building. And here's the thing for local listeners. Did you know that back in the nineteen sixties they were looking to turn Palmdale into a superport. It was going to be five times the size of LAX and it was for supersonic intercontinental jetliners. That's right. With just a small tweak of history, Palmdale could have become the loudest part of southern California. Well, anyway, we're at LAX and we're watching the flight board for two flights this morning. The first is a trans world airline flight TWA flight two departing for Kansas City, and it's scheduled to take off at let's see nine oh one this morning. The next departure is a United Airlines flight UA flight seven one eight, the parting for Chicago Midway Airport, scheduled to take off just three minutes later. The TWA flight was a lockeed L ten forty nine, a super constellation carrying seventy people on board, sixty four passengers and six crew. It was a large, four engine long range airliner with a really distinctive design choice. You know what a tailwing looks like, You know, if you drew an airplane two small flat or horizontal wings and one big vertical fin on top. Those are actually called stabilizers, and they do pretty much what they say. They helped stabilize the flight. They even have control surfaces built into them that control the lift and pitch and provide even more control of the aircraft. Well. I know, lockeyed engineers built the constellation as a response to the McDonald Douglas DC six, but they also must have wanted it to be history's most stable plane. See most tailwing stabilizers are fairly small compared to the main wing span, but the constellations tail was almost half as long as the wings and had three vertical stabilizers. The whole thing came from the mind of Howard Hughes, who was basically the Tony Stark of his day, who's a film director, business magnate, investor, philanthropist, a record setting pilot engineer, and the richest man in the world world and sadly, if you've ever seen him represented, it was probably portrayed as emaciated, with long fingernails and Kleenex boxes on his feet. He died at seventy from too little food and too many drugs. United Airlines Flight seven one eight was aboard a beautiful, brand new McDonnell Douglas DC seven. She was snazy. It was the newest and fastest plane in America, and she was the pride of United's fleet. But not that the flights were racing for one thing. The DC seven carried fifty eight people on board, fifty three passengers and five crew and second the pilots were seasoned professionals. Flying for twa this morning was Captain Jack Gandy, a forty one year old man with almost fifteen thousand flight hours to his name. Which was an impressive feedback. Then, shortly after takeoff, Captain Gandy wanted to rise to twenty one thousand feet to avoid a cloud bank dead ahead. He was given permission and reminded about the United Airlines flight somewhere around a six. If you're young enough, you might not speak clock, but six is behind you, three to your right, nine to yer left, and twelve is dead ahead. There was always part From the very beginning of aviation, all planes followed the concept of sea and avoid, and by the nineteen fifties these were known as visual flight rules. Pilots take responsibility for keeping an eye on their surroundings and avoiding contact with bad weather or other flights, and pilots would look for visual ground cues and radio their position back to their own airlines air traffic controllers who would keep track of them using paper tokens on maps, sounds quaint, and the ground cues were called way points. Flying for United that day was forty eight year old Captain Bob Shirley, and he'd clock more than seventeen thousand flight hours. He'd pretty much had the same conversation with controllers that United about the cloud and also changed his flight path to avoid it. See, when you fly from Lax to most points east, you're going to travel over northern Arizona, which, as we already described, was indescribably beautiful, and most pilots, wanting to leave a great impression on their passengers, would alter their course to fly over the Grand Canyon. It was expected, if not actively encouraged, that pilots make a few turns over the canyon to give passengers the rarest view of their lives. That view alone was a marketing milestone for the airlines, and air traffic control was pretty basic. Like we said, once a pilot left the busy air space around a city or an airport, as long as they followed visual flight rules, they could pretty much do whatever they wanted. Both flights had already passed waypoints of palm springs and needles right on the border into Arizona, and after that they'd pass over a waypoint in Arizona's painted desert. If you never heard of it, it's this unworldly place of petrified trees and rocks so colorful that appears like it was painted. They were expected to hit that around ten thirty one that morning and then say adios and head their separate ways. At ten fifty one, air traffic control headquarters at Salt Lake City got a call from United Airlines. Controllers normally get flight information by phone from individual airline dispatchers who were in radio contact with their pilots. United said that flight seven and eight was twenty minutes late to check in and radio calls had gone unanswered. Meanwhile, another controller was fielding a call from TWA flight two. Same story. Of course, back in those days, there was literally nothing they could do about it but just sit and wait. After an hour, still no contact, so controllers issued an advisory that two planes were missing and asked pilots to keep an eye out for anything unusual. Well, one pair of pilots did, Henry and Paul Hudgins ran Grand Canyon Airlines, was a very early sightseeing service, which made them extremely familiar with the area, and before long they found smoke. The smoke led them to the shattered wreckage of a United DC seven. It had impacted the wall of the canyon and stuck out from an abutment about halfway up as sheer face. From there, about a mile away, they found the unmistakable pronged tail of a Lockheed super Constellation laying in the ravine. The rest of the plane appeared to have burned uncontrollably. Nearby. Rescuers were dispatched by helicopter to the scene. They first visited the remains of TWA flight two plane and engine parts laid scattered across the valley floor, but survivors did not the United flight, but a way different situation. Do you climb up to it? Do you rope down to it? While whatever they did was going to be at least a thousand times more dangerous. Let me explain. If you found yourself paying admission to visit the Grand Canyon National Park and they just welcomed you inside, would you know what to do? The Grand Canyon isn't just some valley via my way. The park would be chocol block with signs that say don't be stupid. Looking at a list of the ten most dangerous national parks in America, ranked by search and air rescues. Out of four thousand incidents over the last few years, almost eight hundred of them happened in the Grand Canyon alone. Most people immediately latch onto the idea of falling in which, once you see it in real life, you can't not think about it. But for the most part, the concern at the Grand Canyon, for me at least, was knowing that this place speaks to the stupid. It's almost like it just challenges and inspires them. I mean, people die taking selfies, people died jumping between rocks. One guide died pretending to fall and actually died falling to his death. And he did it without saying a word, because they assumed he didn't want to make things worse for his family, who he'd been playing the prank on. I mean, come on. In fact, personal anecdote, when I was there, I saw a tour group of twenty people being told all about how dangerous it was right by the lip of the rim, and then he had them all squeeze in and back up so he could take a photo. They were backing up, facing away from the rim, and their guide was a man that they had paid to keep them safe. I couldn't even believe it. About seven hundred people have died there by accident or dark motivation over the years. Everything from rattlesnakes to mountain lions to bighorn sheep and condors might take a go at you, but this is probably the one time where I'm going to say that the animals are the least of your worries. Mountain lion always follows my advice and goes for the throat, and a bighorn sheep could high score an arcade punching machine all day. And because of that, the National Park Service wants you to stay at least two school buses away from them. Sorry, the MPs uses school buses as a unit of measurement, but I'll clarify they mean twelve and one half dodge caravans. Speaking of staying away from stuff, let's get back to the most defining aspect of any great canyon. What's a cliff without a steep drop off? On top of what I already said about a dozen people usually finding the hard way down every year. A tourist recently fell and was alive for the first twenty seven seconds of the fall. None after that. People get mesmerized by the view and they take a misstep. Others have swooned from the heat and taken a gainer. Remember you are in a legitimate desert environment. The temperatures can spike to well over one hundred degrees fahrenheit or forty Celsius. The canyon is so big it creates its own weather. The difference between the lip of the canyon and the valley floor can be as much as twenty five degrees. You could survive heat stroke in the morning, only to dive hypothermia on the same day. Generally, lots of people consider themselves ready to take on the adventure until they're not. One thing most visitors don't even consider is that, depending on where you're standing, you're seven to eight thousand feet above sea level, which means the air is a lot thinner than wherever the hell you came from, which means you could expect some lightheadedness and maybe not make so think good. Lots of people have been pulled away from the Grand Canyon suffering from life threatening levels of heat exhaustion and dehydration. Sunscreen and a hat are no brainers, and obviously water is the greatest treatment for heat exhaustion. Well that keeping out of the sun and trying to keep your body cool in any shade that you can find. Drinking about a gallon or a few leaders of water an hour is a good rule of thumb, and having hiked in the desert, I believe it. Speaking of water. The Grand Canyon is also known for its sudden and intense flash floods. They usually happen between July and September or just after heavy rains, and they channel through the canyon and wash away everything, and they're not generally considered survivable. So the only tip I have is generally keeping an awareness of your environment and having a plan to reach higher ground in the back of your head just in case, and buy higher ground. In this case, I mean whatever parking lot you left your car in. So what the hell happened? Then? Well, first it fell to the Denver Rocky Mountain Rescue Club and a group of world class Swiss mountaineers to retrieve evidence and any human remains. The plane had slammed in the ravine on the northeast slope of Temple Butte. If you watched roadrunner cartoons, you're familiar with those dony table formations just standing there in the desert. Well, they're buttes. Just think of them like isolated flaptopped hills. And in this case, the Temple Butte was carved from the side of the east room of the canyon, and it provided a look at about one hundred million years of time preserved inside the rock. You can literally examine history from the Late Cambrian, all of the Ortivisian and the Silurian periods, and a whole bunch of the Middle Devonian period. Then, if you're ball let what let me just say the oldest rock ever found in the canyon was nice from the elves Chasm, and that thing's birthday cake had over one point eight four billion candles on it. We are talking about time frames here that the human brain is barely capable of even conceiving. And now considering how slow geologic time is. The other side of that coin is how fast the plane's blacked into the canyon. It fell about twenty thousand feet in a minute, and impact that fast would have killed everyone on board. More to the point, if you traveled in a metal tube, call it one hundred feet long, and it was reduced to three feed or less, you would be fundamentally disintegrated. The human body experiencing these kinds of forces would experience severe organ and tissue trauma. Their bones would dislocate and fracture, the blood vessels would rupture, and every organ would take on the consistency of wet dog food. In fact, the weirdest thing is that your body would absorb so much friction and heat and energy from the impact that whatever was left would basically disintegrate. On the one hand, your death would be imperceptibly fast, And I know I try to help you in these moments, but the best treatments involve bleach and peroxides and reliquefying the blood and other bodily fluids to make removing you from the surface easier. If by some miracle, someone actually survived the impact, they'd have roughly enough time to grab a pencil with their mouth or foot or whatever still works and jot down some parting thoughts on a piece of debris. Bringing down remains from an elevation is super dangerous. If this were the Himalayas attempting, it would be practically suicide because of how little oxygen and energy you'd have. Also, the order had been to retrieve any remains that could possibly be identified, which in this tin can blast at full speed into a flat mountain, they could have simply kicked the remains to the valley below for all the extra harm it might cause. And none of that really mattered because it was all consumed by an intense fire. All they found was just a bunch of quote carbonized smears of paint and metal. Equally difficult, but less physically repulsive, was the job of determining the cause of the crash. There were recordings between the pilots and different stations along the way, but cockpit voice and flight data recorders weren't things yet, so unless the pilots left a note, the investigator's first theory was that weather might have knocked both planes out of the sky. There had been a thundercloud in the bank ahead of them. They wanted to know if there was any way a sudden thunderstorm could have been violent enough to knock both planes out of the sky. Well, like we said, people were just starting to get their boner for flying, and pilots knew it was in their best interest to stroke that boner, to make people believe the flying was better than driving. So hell, no, would they voluntarily fly through a thunderstorm. They would maybe those passengers like they were their own kids, maybe more so. Piecing together the utterly obliterated aircraft was going to be a profound challenge, but it was the only way to put together the sequence of events. So the search for every scrap was on. And then about twenty three hundred feet from the wreckage of the constellation, they found a piece of the DC seven's wingtip, same as the tail of the constellation. It was nowhere near the rest of the plane, and this meant it had come off in mid air as well. But that wasn't the weirdest part. And if this gets confusing, I apologize. The wing had red paint on it, but the plane it came from was blue. The plane it did not belong to was red. You ever hear of trading paint in an accident, Well, clearly these two planes had come into contact, which I remind you was almost impossible to imagine. The sky was a big place, and there were only one hundred and seventeen commercial aircraft in the entire state of California. Everyhere about that guy who drunkenly ran over the oldest tree in the world in the middle of the Sahara Desert. There was not another tree to be hit for two hundred and fifty miles in any direction. And how you feel about that is how unimaginable this felt for people of the day. Paint from each aircraft was found on the wreckage of the other, and this was shaping up to become the most important accident in the history of air travel to that point. And if the unimaginable were possible, and not one but two planes could be lost this way, that would destroy the public's confidence and potentially crash the entire industry. They had to recreate and piece together the details of how it all happened. Both flights had been cleared to the same altitude to get around the clouds and so they could find cleaner air leading to the canyon. But the DC seven was the newest and the fastest plane in the fleet. In the space between LA and here it managed to catch up with the Constellation. The DC seven overran the Constellation from their four or five o'clock on the right rear side again if you speak clock, turning hard and descending, but at an angle that meant that their left wing was about to slash through the Constellation. The DC seven bisected the plane at the far aft, just in front of the tail, sending the tail to tumble free, and without the tail, the rest of the craft had a most uniquely unerodynamic experience, falling into an uncontrolled nose dive. The Constellation lost his tail, and the DC seven paid for it with most of one wing and plowed headlong into the side of the canyon. So Captain Shirley snuck up on Captain Gandhy Shirley's bad case closed, you might think, and in perfect additions, Shirley would have seen Gandy for at least two minutes before the collision. But each plane had been doing its own thing to break free of the clouds that whole time. Investigators were able to determine that Captain Shirley emerged from the clouds just seconds before making contact. Imagine popping out of a cloud and looking up to see the end of an airliner coming in fast. Imagine having only seconds to react and knowing it was too late to make a difference. Anyways, Those aboard the TWA flight would have gone from how lovely is all this? To screaming themselves senseless in a heartbeat. The back of their plane had just been ripped off out of nowhere by a competing airline, and those seventy people would spend the next sixty seconds living through indescribable horror that would have been overwhelming to the point of feeling surreal. The main fuselage slammed into the canyon floor, separate from the tail. Meanwhile, Bob Shirley and the crew of the DC seven were also coping with the reality of having lost most of their wing, and they hadn't lost all of their engines, so at least they maintained some hope or illusion or at least a chance to go of fighting for the crew at least, not so much for the passengers and cabin crew. The DC seven quickly rolled the left and landed face first into the wall of the canyon before exploding. When the American public learned the results of the investigation, as anticipated, they freaked out, Fingers pointed everywhere. The obvious conclusion was that the pilots were to blame. Some blamed Captain Gandhy as he was the one who switched altitudes, but others blamed Captain Shirley because they overtook the other plane. But since there was no way for Captain Shirley to avoid the collision and they were both technically following the rules and still ended up at the same place at the same time, Yeah, that couldn't decide so air traffic controllers they became demonized as chaotic and primitive but there was no physical or technical way for any of them to advise every company dispatcher on the precise location of every plane in the sky, so that was a non starter or two. So they concluded that the blame lay not with the pilots or the controllers, but with the air traffic control system as a whole. The public had not lost their flight boner, but they wanted to know that they were going to be safe while using it. And as a direct result of the crash, and after a few more accidents and near missus, not long after, the Federal Aviation Administration was created to take responsibility for air traffic across the United States. Air traffic controllers across the country were trained on updated practices and technologies. Up till then, air traffic safety meant seatbelts, the plane head landing gear, the cockpit had a window, you know that kind of stuff. But now we were talking about collision avoidance systems, improved navigational tools, flight data recorders, and at long last, adapted from military to commercial use radar. There wouldn't be this level of upgrade for another six decades when they switched over to GPS for track aircraft in real time It all represented the biggest sea change in the history of air safety. After the FAA's formation, collisions between aircraft more or less vanished. Remember when I was going on about how danger the work of removing wreckage and human remains were. They were so frustrated by the ongoing effort that the wreckage and human remains kind of remained on the scene for the next two decades. And over those twenty years, more than a few a moral souvenir hunters took advantage. And so you know that's a federal offense. Stealing stuff from a crash scene. You can rack up a ten year prison stay. In nineteen seventy six, the National Park Service finally got the airlines to pay for the removal of the majority of the remaining debris by helicopter, and any small items that remained became officially protected by the Federal Antiquities Act in two thousand and six, before the whole area was designated as a National Historic Landmark in twenty fourteen. That was the very first National Historic Landmark dedicated to an accident site. This was the first time that more than one hundred people had died in a plane accident. There was a single reverent service held in Flagstaff, Arizona, in three different faiths for the unidentified victims of the two planes, and at the desert viewpoint on the South Rim, a stone memorial commemorates the loss of one hundred and twenty eight people that day, even though it doesn't actually call out the number of dead, but it does remind the reader that air travel and the entire industry was made safer as a result. A plaque at the site reads, in part, this tragic accident site represents a watershed moment in the modernization of America's airways. So I brought it up at some point, But yes, I was lucky enough to spend some time around the Grand Canyon a while back, and although it didn't hypnotize me into walking blankly into its endless ma, when I came across that memorial plaquard describing today's episode, alluding to the spots where the planes came to rest so long ago, I got so excited that people kind of held their kids a little closer when they were around me. The collision over the Grand Canyon is one of the most significant accidents in the history flight and the Hopeie tribe of Arizona has always placed great spiritual significance on the area. They believe that on pond death, a person passes westward upstream from the confluence of the waters in the canyon, and then they travel through the place of emergence on their journey to the afterlife. They consider the Grand Canyon a gateway to the afterlife and I wholeheartedly agree. You can reach out to us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or just fire us an email to Doomsday pod at gmail dot com. We're also on TikTok as doomsday dot dot podcast, but I don't have access at the moment. Older episodes can be found where we've found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends. And on a more serious note, if you or someone you care about is experiencing thoughts of self harm or suicide, people need to understand that they're not alone and there are people ready to help and they're only a Google search away, or just call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at one eight hundred two seven three talk. If you'd like to support the ongoing production of the show, you can find us at Patreon dot com, Slash funeral Kazoo, or you can just buy me a coffee at buy meacoffee dot com slash doomsday slash doomsday. But if you can spare the money and had to choose, we ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over three point six million people across seventy seven different countries. You can learn more and donate at Global Medic dot ca on the next episode. In the beginning, you'll think of calling a plumber, by the middle, you might be thinking of calling a realtor. But by the end you may need to call a coroner. It's the Guadalajara Street disaster of nineteen ninety two. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off and thanks for listening.