An Eastern Airlines Constellation loading at Logan Airport in Boston. The doomed ‘Connie’ had taken off from Logan and was heading to Newark when it collided with a jet airliner over South Salem. — High Sierra Spotters

The field in North Salem shows the scars from the crash landing as well as the wreckage at upper left. Notice that the field is on a hillside, an upward slope for the landing airliner.

Firefighters appear ghostly beside the burned wreckage of the Eastern Airlines Constellation that crashed in nearby North Salem 50 years ago this week. — Syd Greenberg photo, via Rich Remsberg Image Research

Airliner crashes and burns,
but most on board survive

The mid-air collision of two airliners 50 years ago tomorrow was tragic for some — including the pilot, who was later hailed as a hero. For most, however, the end of Eastern Airline Flight 853 was miraculous.

Late in the afternoon of Dec. 4, 1965, a TWA Boeing 707 jetliner, on its way from San Francisco to Kennedy Airport, collided with an Eastern Airlines Super Constellation on a flight from Boston to Newark. The crash occurred over South Salem, slicing 25 feet off one wing of the jetliner and much of the tail off the Constellation, and raining pieces of aircraft over Lewisboro and eventually Ridgefield.

Both planes went into a dive, but both flight crews managed to wrestle control of their aircraft. Despite its damage, the TWA jet limped to a safe landing at Kennedy. The Eastern “Connie” was not so lucky.

The Constellation was critically damaged, unable to be steered in traditional ways. However, Captain Charles J. White found that by adjusting the throttles of the four prop engines, he could maintain some control of direction and elevation. He turned the plane northeastward toward Danbury, perhaps thinking of heading to Danbury Airport. The plane flew over western Ridgefield, still dropping parts from the collision, passed over Lake Mamanasco, and turned westward toward a large field on Fox Lane Farm, just south of Route 116, about 300 yards across the Ridgefield line in North Salem.

Keeping his plane’s nose up and wheels retracted, Capt. White pancaked the 55-ton Constellation into an upward-sloping field of Hunt Mountain. As the airliner slid along, the left wing struck a tree, shearing it off and causing the aircraft to burst into flames.

Only four of the 53 passengers and crew were killed — one of them was Capt. White, who succumbed to smoke inhalation while trying to get the last passenger out of the cabin.

Like a bomb

“It was like watching a dreadful movie and not being able to do anything,” said Will Johnson of nearby Hobby Drive. Johnson had heard the plane’s engines whining and stalling as the pilot struggled to control the aircraft, and was watching as the plane came down.

“It sounded like a bomb going off, an orange-colored blast,” he told The Press.

Johnson — a cartoonist who drew for the famous comic strip Nancy — was the first to call police reporting the crash.

Ridgefield Police and Fire Departments were the first emergency personnel to arrive. In the following two hours, scores of fire trucks and ambulances from towns miles away responded — many more than were needed. They were joined by at least six helicopters from various agencies. Passengers and crew were evacuated to many area hospitals, but most to Danbury, the nearest.

Spectators, too, clogged roadways for days, creating huge traffic jams. Some people even managed to picnic on grounds overlooking the crash site.

One of the first people on the scene was Marion Rikert of Ridgebury Road, who was visiting a neighbor when she witnessed the plane coming down. After calling the fire department, she sped to the scene to assist. She helped bring many victims to a horse barn at the Fox Lane Farm.

“I was surprised at how calm and efficient everyone was,” she told The Press afterward.

Rikert witnessed unusual reactions of crash victims. Many passengers wanted to know where they were and some were so insistent that she had to show them a map with North Salem on it. “They seemed relieved,” she said. “They had found some connection and seemed satisfied that they knew where they were.”

One man was concerned about making it to his house in New Jersey and, despite the chaos of the crash scene, kept asking others how he would get home.

A woman was worried about the mink coat she was wearing when the plane crashed, but which had somehow gotten lost. “She wasn’t about to leave until she found that coat,” Mrs. Rikert said. Someone retrieved it from the ground near the fuselage.

Another victim took a dog into her arms, held it, and just cried, Rikert said.

Though he had been burned and otherwise injured in the crash, a priest who’d been a passenger moved among the victims, administering last rites to some and consoling others.

Nearly 50 years later, Jim McGinnis recalled what it was like aboard the doomed plane. He was a 20-year-old Army private on his way home to New Jersey on leave.

“The aircraft started to do all kinds of gyrations,” he told The Journal News of Westchester in 2014. “You could hear the engines revving and revving. We hit the ground, not knowing if we had wheels or anything. We just scraped, you could hear all the scraping, the friction. Then, after what seemed a tremendously long time … the aircraft stopped. And I looked around like, ‘Wow.’ I went for my hat under the seat and all I could feel was dirt.”

It was another Army private whom Capt. White was trying to help. The soldier’s seat belt was stuck. Both were overcome by the smoke, and both died.

Extraordinary courage

In 1965, Dick Aarons, a young reporter specializing in aviation for The Philadelphia Daily News, was sent to cover the crash. Aarons, who is still an aeronautical journalist, now lives in Ridgefield and volunteers for the town as an emergency coordinator. Like many others, he was impressed with Capt. White and the crew of the Eastern airliner. “Thanks to the extraordinary skills and courage of the Constellation crew, 50 people survived that accident, and except for Capt. White’s selflessness, it would have been 51,” Aarons said.

White, he added, demonstrated airmanship that “would inspire a generation of young pilots toward excellence.”

Aarons explained in a 2004 magazine article that after the collision, “there was no response from the controls or trim tabs, but the crew discovered through trial and error that some degree of control was available by adjusting the throttles. The aircraft descended through solid clouds and recovery was made below the clouds by use of the throttles only. Then, several zooms were made back into the clouds as the pilots attempted to gain control over their airplane.”

Capt. White and First Officer Roger I. Holt Jr., 34, found they could maintain limited control by adjusting the power, but the aircraft was still descending at 500 feet per minute. “It was apparent to the crew that their airplane was mortally wounded and that they needed to find someplace to put it down.”

The landscape below was mostly wooded, and the few fields were barely big enough to handle a single-engine plane; there was no way a four-engine Super Constellation with a 123-foot wingspan could land.

“Capt. White told passengers the aircraft was definitely out of control and that a crash landing would be made,” Aarons said. “He advised everyone to remove sharp objects from their pockets and to fasten their seat belts tightly.”

As the plane headed north over Ridgefield, Capt. White spotted the sizable pasture on Hunt Mountain. “He aligned the aircraft using asymmetric thrust, told passengers to ‘brace yourselves’ and descended into the up-sloping hillside with wheels and flaps retracted. At the last moment, White jammed the throttles forward, pitching the nose up, allowing the Connie to pancake into the 15% slope.”

The plane skidded 700 feet before coming to rest, one wing broken off and the fuselage in three pieces.

The fact that White was able to fly the aircraft without controls and then maneuver the plane so the nose was aiming upward in line with the hillside, Aarons said, was “a remarkable feat of airmanship.”

White was later laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery, close to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier; he had been a major in the U.S. Air Force.

The cause?

What caused the two airplanes, with experienced flight crews, to collide? Investigators found nothing malfunctioning with either aircraft and that both had been flying at their assigned altitudes — 10,000 feet for the Constellation and 11,000 for the Boeing jet.

Federal investigators eventually determined that an optical illusion, due to an “up-slope effect of cloud tops,” caused the Eastern crew to misjudge the elevation of the TWA jet. While the two planes were in fact 1,000 feet apart in elevation, they seemed to be at the same level because of the cloud formations.

As Aarons described the event, “First Officer Holt looked out his right window. The Connie was flying into the sun and ducking in and out of a ‘fluffy’ cloud deck with tops about 300 feet above the airplane’s flight level.

“Suddenly, as the Connie emerged from a cloud puff, Holt saw the TWA Boeing in his right side window at the 2 o’clock position. The aircraft appeared to be converging rapidly and at the same altitude. Holt shouted, ‘Look out,’ placed his hands on the control wheel and made a very rapid application of up elevator simultaneously with the captain. Crew members and passengers were pulled down into their seats.”

The crew of the TWA jet then spotted the Eastern airliner “on what appeared to be a collision course.” The jet’s captain and copilot performed evasive maneuvers, but the left wing of the jet clipped the triple-tail of the Constellation.

Aarons noted that the accident was among several that ultimately led to changes in spacing of aircraft near busy aviation centers, improved air traffic control radar, and better onboard equipment for reporting altitude.

Odd coincidences [could be used as sidebar]

The accident included two odd Ridgefield coincidences.

The heroic Capt. White was the brother of Elsa Caddell of Catoonah Street. Her husband, Loren, had been president of the Ridgefield Volunteer Fire Department, which had been among the first emergency personnel on the scene. (The Caddells, incidentally, were in the news 10 years later when their 43-pound house cat, named Spice, made the Guinness Book of Records.)

One of the passengers in the crashed plane was Aleta D. Styers of Niles, Mich., who was flying east to visit Ridgefield friends who lived on West Mountain Road — less than two miles from where the plane crashed.

After she was treated at the scene, Styers called her friends and asked them to pick her up in North Salem, 50 miles north of where she was supposed to have landed.

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