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Flight 629 Longmont CO crash...
Flight 629 Longmont CO crash...
Item # 566182
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November 02, 1955
THE DETROIT NEWS, Detroit, Michigan, November 2, 1955
* Flight 629 airplane disaster
* Longmont, CO
This 84 page newspaper has a nice six column headline on the front page: "AIR CRASH KILLS 44 NEAR DENVER" with subheads and a few related photos with more inside. This tells of the explosion of United DC-6 flight 629 over Longmont, Colorado.
Other news, sports and advertisements of the day throughout. Light spine wear, otherwise in good condition.
wikipedia notes: United Airlines Flight 629, registration N37559, was a Douglas DC-6B aircraft, named "Mainliner Denver," which was blown up with a dynamite bomb placed in the checked luggage. The explosion occurred over Longmont, Colorado while the airplane was en route from Denver, Colorado to Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, on November 1, 1955. All 39 passengers and five crew members on board were killed in the explosion and crash.
The flight had originated at New York City's La Guardia Airport and made a scheduled stop in Chicago before continuing on to Denver's Stapleton Airfield. At Denver there was a crew change, and the captain who assumed command of the flight for the segments to Portland and Seattle, Lee Hall, was a World War II veteran.
The flight took off at 6:52 p.m. Mountain time. Eleven minutes later, Stapleton Airport tower controllers saw two bright lights suddenly appear in the sky north-northwest of the airport. Both lights were observed for thirty to forty-five seconds, and both fell to the ground at roughly the same speed. The controllers then saw a very bright flash originating at or near the ground, intense enough to illuminate the base of the clouds above the source of the flash. Upon observing the mysterious lights, the controllers quickly tried to determine if they were indications of an aircraft in distress and contacted all aircraft flying in the area; all flights were quickly accounted for except for United Flight 629.
Numerous telephone calls soon began coming in from farmers and other residents near the town of Longmont, who reported loud explosions and fiery debris falling from the nighttime sky -- the remains of Flight 629. Ground searchers who reached the crash site noted that all 44 people aboard the DC-6B had died instantly. The debris from the accident was scattered across six square miles of Weld County, Colorado.
Category: The 20th Century
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