Summary
- TWA Flight 529 crashed due to the loss of a bolt from the elevator boost system, causing an unrecoverable stall.
- The crash occurred just 5 minutes after takeoff, resulting in the disintegration of the Lockheed Constellation in Willowbrook, Illinois.
- A memorial service honoring the 78 victims was held 60 years after the tragedy, marking the site with a memorial marker.
It was September 1, 1961. Trans World Airlines flight 529 was getting ready to depart from Chicago Midway Airport. The flight had already come in from Boston and was en route to Las Vegas and then San Francisco, the final destination. They had stopped in Pittsburgh and New York on the way. The Lockheed Constellation L-049 had 73 passengers and five crew onboard.
The crew
The captain was James Sanders. He’d been with TWA since 1945 and had accumulated over 17,000 flight hours. The first officer was Dale Tarrant who had been an Air Force instructor and pilot on a troop carrier aircraft. James Newlin was the flight engineer and had been with TWA for ten years.
The flight attendants were Barbara Pearson and Nanette Fidger. Nanette was 20 years old and preferred to be called ‘Nan’. She had just one more flight to complete, before leaving her job to get married to her fiancé, who worked in insurance sales.
Barbara was 24 years old and had been married for just less than a year. She’d worked for TWA for 4 years. This was her last flight. She was pregnant and looked forward to becoming a mother. She was going to announce it to her husband when she got back to California.
At the airport
It had been a busy evening with so many flights. The four-engined propliner arrived at Chicago Midway Airport at 01:18 local time. The aircraft was refueled and oiled and the new flight crew members joined and briefed for the next flight. Barbara and Nan prepared for the flight, welcoming passengers onboard and helping them to stow their luggage. They chatted with passengers and calmed any nerves anyone had about flying.
At the time, flying was still in its infancy and a new experience for most people. In 1961, there had already been six airliner crashes in the United States that claimed 222 lives. So, some were understandably anxious. There were a lot of young families on board and there were 20 children. There was one family of seven and two families of five.
The flight attendants, glamorous in their immaculate uniforms, brought a calm and courteous presence to the aircraft. They would demonstrate what passengers needed to do in an emergency and show them where the exits were. They then checked that all luggage was stowed away and seatbelts were fastened. Nan and Barbara would take their jumpseats for the very last time, no doubt thinking about the new lives they had ahead of them.
What happened next?
The Lockheed Constellation departed runway 22 at 02:00 and the take-off roll was completely normal. The aircraft climbed and headed west. Just four minutes after take-off, at 5,000 feet, the aircraft suddenly pitched up violently. It would have been terrifying in the cabin with such an unusual movement. Barbara and Nan would have known there was something very wrong but were helpless to do anything.
In the cockpit, the pilots were doing everything they could to try and regain control of the elevator. They tried to revert to manual control as the aircraft pitched up but the nose down pressure on the elevators meant that manual control of the elevator was mechanically impossible. The pilots desperately applied nose down pressure to avoid the stall but could not gain control of the elevator.
The Aftermath
The accelerated stall was unrecoverable. On the ground, residents saw the aircraft lights at a steep angle. There was a loud roar and dishes in houses rattled and dogs barked. The horizontal stabilizer snapped off and the aircraft flew into the ground and exploded. The Constellation disintegrated in a cornfield in Willowbrook, just 11 miles from the airport. There was an eerie silence.
Residents and first responders rushed to the scene hoping to pull out any survivors. There were none. There was a sense of confusion. How could a plane just drop from the sky? Some bodies were found still strapped in their seats and debris was strewn among the tangled and twisted wreckage that remained.
First responders collected bodies and took them to the make-shift morgue nearby. Investigators started to assess the wreckage and then collected it in the days after. It would be painstakingly slow to piece the aircraft back together to discover what happened to cause such a tragedy.
The cause of the accident
The Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) report says that the cause of the accident was the loss of a bolt from the linkage of the elevator boost system which resulted in the immediate pitch-up of the aircraft. This pitch led to loss of control and the subsequent crash of the aircraft. They believed that the bolt had likely worked itself loose and fallen out, just before the stall.
A memorial service was held at the site in Prairie Trail Park, Willowbrook, Illinois on its 60th anniversary in 2021. A memorial marker was placed at the site, dedicated to the 78 victims of TWA flight 529.