[deanmine]

Southern Airways Flight 242 was a scheduled flight from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to Atlanta, Georgia, with a stopover in Huntsville, Alabama. On April 4, 1977, the flight experienced a catastrophic event when it was forced to land on Georgia State Route 381 in New Hope, Paulding County, Georgia, United States. This emergency landing occurred after the aircraft, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9-31, suffered severe hail damage and lost thrust in both engines during a thunderstorm.

At the time of the accident, the aircraft was en route from Huntsville-Madison County Jetport to Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport. The crash resulted in the deaths of 63 people on the aircraft, including both pilots, and nine people on the ground. Twenty passengers survived, along with two flight attendants.

The flight crew consisted of Captain William W. "Bill" McKenzie, a highly experienced pilot, and First Officer Lyman W. Keele Jr. They were aware of the presence of embedded thunderstorms and possible tornadoes along their route prior to departure from Huntsville, but were not informed that the cells had formed a squall line. The crew attempted to navigate through the storm using their onboard weather radar but were misled by the radar's attenuation effect, leading them into the peak convective activity point.

As the aircraft descended near Rome, Georgia, it entered a thunderstorm cell and encountered a massive amount of rain and hail. The hail broke the aircraft's windshield, and the ingestion of water and hail caused both engines to fail. The crew attempted unsuccessfully to restart the engines and glided unpowered while trying to find an emergency landing field. Eventually, they executed an unpowered forced landing on a rural highway. During the rollout, the aircraft's left wing collided with a gas station, causing it to swerve and crash into a wooded area.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigated the accident and concluded that the probable cause was the total loss of thrust from both engines while the aircraft was penetrating a severe thunderstorm. Contributing factors included the failure of the company's dispatching system to provide the flight crew with up-to-date severe weather information, the captain's reliance on airborne weather radar for navigating through thunderstorm areas, and limitations in the Federal Aviation Administration's air traffic control system.




Cockpit Voice Recorder Transcript:

Capt = Captain
FO = First Officer (flying the plane)
AC = Atlanta Center
AA = Atlanta Approach
CAM = Cockpit area mike


4:03:48 Capt: "Looks heavy, nothing’s going through that."
4:03:54 Capt: "See that?"
4:03:56 FO: "That’s a hole , isn’t it?"
4:03:57 Capt: "It’s not showing a hole; see it?"
4:04:05 CAM: (Sound of rain)
4:04:08 FO: "Do you want to go around that right now?"
4:04:19 Capt: "Hand fly at about two eighty-five knots."
FO: "Two eight five."
4:04:30 CAM: (Sound of hail and rain)
4:04:53 S242: "Southern Two-Forty-Two, we’re slowing it up here a little bit."
4:04:53 AC: "Two-Forty-Two, roger."
4:05:53 FO: "Which way do we go, cross here or go out—I don’t know how we get through there, Bill."
Capt: "I know you’re just gonna have to go out…."
FO: "Yeah, right across that band."
4:06:01 Capt: "All clear left approximately right now; I think we can cut across there now."
4:06:12 FO: "All right, here we go."
4:06:25 FO: "We’re picking up some ice, Bill."
4:06:29 Capt: "We are above 10 degrees."
FO: "Right at 10."
Capt: "Yeah."
4:06:30 AC (to TWA 584): "I show the weather up northwest of that position north of Rome, just on the edge of it—I tell you what, maintain one five thousand."
4:06:38 TWA 584: "Maintain one five thousand; we paint pretty good weather one or two o’clock."
4:06:41 FO: "He’s got to be right through that hole about now."
4:06:42 AC: "Southern Two-Forty-Two descend and maintain one four thousand at this time."
4:06:46 Capt: "Who’s that?"
4:06:48 FO: "TWA."
AC: "Southern Two-Forty-Two, descend and maintain one four thousand."
4:06:53 S242: "Two-Forty-Two down to fourteen."
4:06:55 AC: "Affirmative."
CAM: (Heavy hail or rain sound starts and continues until power interruption.)
4:07:00 AC: "Southern Two-Forty-Two, Atlanta altimeter two-niner-five-six, and cross 40 miles northwest of Atlanta two-five-zero knots."
CAM: (Sound similar to electrical disturbance)
4:07:57 CAM: (Power interruption for 36 seconds)
4:08:33 CAM: (Power restored)
CAM: (Sound of rain continues for 40 seconds)
4:08:34 AC: "Southern Two-Forty-Two, Atlanta."
4:08:37 FO: "Got it, got it back, Bill; got it back, got it back [probably referring to the engines]."
4:08:42 S242: "Uh, Two-Forty-Two, stand by."
4:08:46 AC: "Say again."
4:08:48 S242: "Stand by."
4:08:49 AC: "Roger, maintain one five thousand if you understand me; maintain one five thousand, Southern Two-Forty-Two."
4:08:55 S242: "We’re trying to get it up there."
4:08:57 AC: "Roger."
4:09:15 S242: "Okay, uh, Two-Forty-Two, uh, we just got our windshield busted and, uh, we’ll try to get it back up to fifteen, we’re fourteen."
4:09:24 FO: "Fifteen thousand."
4:09:25 AC: "Southern Two-Forty-Two, you say you’re at fourteen now?"
4:09:27 S242: "Yeah, uh, couldn’t help it."
4:09:30 AC: "That’s OK, uh, are you squawking five-six-two-three?"
4:09:36 FO: "Left engine won’t spool."
4:09:37 S242: "Our left engine just cut out."
4:09:42 AC: "Southern Two-Forty-Two roger, and, uh, lost your transponder, squawk five-six-two-three."
4:09:43 FO: "I am squawking five-six-two-three, tell him I’m level fourteen."
4:09:49 S242: "Five-six-two-three, we’re squawking."
4:09:53 AC: "Say you lost an engine and, uh, busted a windshield?"
4:09:56 S242: "Yes sir."
4:09:59 Capt: "Autopilot’s off."
FO: "I’ve got it; I’ll hand-fly it."
4:10:00 AC: "Southern Two-Forty-Two, you can descend and maintain one three thousand now, that’ll get you down a little lower."
4:10:04 FO: "My (deleted), the other engine’s going, too (deleted)"
4:10:05 S242: "Got the other engine going, too."
4:10:08 AC: "Southern Two-Forty-Two, say again."
4:10:10 S242: "Stand by—we lost both engines."
4:10:14 FO: "All right, Bill, get us a vector to a clear area."
4:10:16 S242: "Get us a vector to a clear area, Atlanta."
4:10:20 AC: "Uh, continue present southeastern bound heading; TWA’s off to your left about 14 miles at fourteen thousand and says he’s in the clear."
4:10:25 S242: "OK."
4:10:27 S242: "Want us to turn left?"
4:10:30 AC: "Southern Two-Forty-Two, contact approach control, one two six point nine, and they’ll try to get you straight into Dobbins."
4:10:35 S242: "One two—."
4:10:36 FO: "Give me—I’m familiar with Dobbins; tell them to give me a vector to Dobbins if they’re clear.
4:10:38 S242: "Give me, uh, vector to Dobbins if they’re clear."
4:10:41 AC: "Southern Two-Forty-Two, one twenty-six point nine, they’ll give you a vector to Dobbins."
4:10:45 S242: "Twenty-six nine, OK."
4:10:50 FO: "Ignition override, it’s gotta work by (deleted)."
4:10:56 CAM: [Power interruption for 2 minutes, 4 seconds]
4:13:00 CAM: [Power restored]
4:13:03 Capt: "There we go."
FO: "Get us a vector to Dobbins."
4:13:04 S242: "Uh, Atlanta, you read Southern Two-Forty-Two?"
4:13:08 AA: "Southern Two-Forty-Two, Atlanta approach control; uh, go ahead.
4:13:11 S242: "Uh, we’ve lost both engines—how about giving us a vector to the nearest place. We’re at seven thousand feet.
4:13:17 AA: "Southern Two-Forty-Two, roger, turn right heading one zero zero, will be vectors to Dobbins for a straight-in approach Runway One-One, altimeter two niner five two, your position is 15, correction 20 miles west of Dobbins at this time."
4:13:18 FO: "What’s Dobbins’ weather, Bill? How far is it? How far is it?"
4:13:31 S242: "Okay, uh, one-forty heading and 20 miles."
4:13:35 AA: "Ah, make a heading of one-two-zero, Southern Two-Forty-Two, right turn to one-two-zero."
4:13:40 S242: "Okay, right turn to one-two-zero and, uh, you got us our squawk, haven’t you, on emergency?"
FO: "Declare an emergency, Bill."
4:13:45 AA: "Uh, I’m not receiving it. But radar contact; your position is 20 miles west of Dobbins."
4:14:03 FO: "Get those engines (deleted)."
4:14:24 S242: "All right, listen, we’ve lost both engines, and, uh, I can’t, uh, tell you the implications of this—we, uh, only got two engines and how far is Dobbins now?"
4:14:34 AA: "Southern, uh, Two-Forty-Two, uh, 19 miles."
4:14:40 S242: "OK, we’re out of, uh, fifty-eight hundred, 200 knots."
4:14:44 FO: "What’s our speed? Let’s see, what’s our weight, Bill? Get me a bug speed."
4:14:45 AA: "Southern Two-Forty-Two, do you have one engine running now?"
4:14:47 FO: "No."
4:14:48 S242: "Negative, no engines."
4:14:50 AA: "Roger."
4:14:59 Capt: "One twenty six." [This probably refers to the final approach speed.]
FO: "One twenty six."
4:15:04 Capt: "Just don’t stall this thing out."
FO: "No, I won’t."
Capt: "Get your wing flaps."
CAM: [Sound of lever movement.]
4:15:11 FO: "Got it, got hydraulics so we got…."
Capt: "We got hydraulics."
4:15:17 FO: "What’s the Dobbins weather?
4:15:18 S242: "What’s your Dobbins weather?"
4:15 AA: "Stand by."
4:15:25 FO: "Get Dobbins on the approach plate."
4:15:42 Capt: "I can’t find Dobbins. Tell me where’s it at? Atlanta?"
FO: "Yes."
4:15:46 AA: Southern Two-Forty-Two, Dobbins weather is two thousand scattered, estimated ceiling three thousand broken, seven thousand overcast, visibility seven miles."
4:15:57 S242: "OK, we’re down to forty-six hundred now."
4:15:59 FO: "How far is it? How far is it?"
4:16:00 AA: "Roger, and you’re approximately, uh, 17 miles west of Dobbins at this time."
4:16:05 S242: "I don’t know whether we can make that or not."
4:16:07 AA: "Roger."
4:16:11 FO: "Ah, ask him if there is anything between here and Dobbins?
Capt: "What?"
FO: "Ask him if there is anything between here and Dobbins."
4:16:25 S242: "Uh, is there any airport between our position and Dobbins?"
4:16:29 AA: "Southern Two-Forty-Two, uh, no sir, uh, closest airport is Dobbins."
4:16:34 S242: "I doubt we’re going to make it, but we’re trying everything to get something started."
4:16:38 AA: AA: "Roger, well, there is Cartersville; you’re approximately 10 miles south of Cartersville, 15 miles west of Dobbins."
4:16:44 FO: "We’ll take a vector to that. Yes, we’ll have to go there."
4:16:45 S242: "Can you give us a vector to Cartersville?"
4:16:47 AA: "All right, turn left, heading of three-six-zero be directly, uh, direct vector to Cartersville."
4:16:52 S242: "Three six zero, roger."
FO: "What runway? What’s the heading on the runway?"
4:16:53 S242: "What’s the runway heading?"
4:16:58 AA: "Stand by."
4:16:59 S242: "And how long is it?"
4:17:00 AA: "Stand by."
4:17:08 Capt: "Like we are, I’m picking out a clear field."
4:17:12 FO: "Bill, you’ve got to find me a highway."
Capt: "Let’s get the next clear open field."
FO: "No (deleted)."
4:17:35 Capt: "See a highway over—no cars."
FO: "Right there, is that straight?"
4:17:39 Capt: "No."
4:17:44 AA: "Southern Two-Forty-Two, the runway configuration…"
FO: "We’ll have to take it."
4:17:55 AA: "…at Cartersville is, uh, three six zero and running north and south and the elevation is seven hundred fifty-six feet and, uh, trying to get the length of now—it’s three thousand two hundred feet long."
4:17:58 CAM: [Beep on gear horn.]
CAM: [Gear horn steady for 4 seconds.]
4:18:02 S242: "Uh, we’re putting it on the highway, we’re down to nothing."
4:18:07 FO: "Flaps."
Capt: "They’re at fifty."
FO: "Oh (deleted), Bill, I hope we can do it."
4:18:14 FO: "I’ve got it, I got it."
4:18:15 FO: "I’m going to land right over that guy."
4:18:20 Capt: "There’s a car ahead."
4:18:25 FO: "I got it Bill, I’ve got it now, I got it.
Capt: "OK."
4:18:30 Capt: "Don’t stall it."
FO: "I gotta bug."
4:18:31 FO: "We’re going to do it right here."
4:18:34 FO: "I got it."
4:18:36 CAM: [Sound of breakup.]
4:18:43 End of tape.

[Zahir82]

Wow! Just incredible how these two people just kept trying till the end! So sad!

[Clubhouse]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Souther...ays_Flight_242

Snip from above link:

As the aircraft ran out of altitude and options, gliding with a broken windshield and no engine power, the crew made visual contact with the ground and spotted a straight section of a rural highway below. They executed an unpowered forced landing on that road, but during the rollout the aircraft collided with a gas station/grocery store and other structures. The flight crew and 60 passengers were killed due to impact forces and fire, but 19 of the passengers survived, as well as both flight attendants. Eight people on the ground died. One passenger initially survived the crash but died on June 5, 1977. A seriously injured person on the ground died around one month later. The NTSB defined their injuries as serious, as at the time the Code of Federal Regulations defined a fatal injury as one that results in death within seven days of the accident. Among the fatally injured passengers was rhythm and blues singer Annette Snell.

[deanmine]

!

[deanmine]

“YOUR DAD WENT TO FLY PLANES IN HEAVEN…”

By Tiffany Keele Grana

I will never forget those eight words. It was what the pastor’s wife told me on that windy and rainy night when I was sent to stay at our neighbor’s house because my mom had to leave so quickly…. I don’t really remember seeing my mom for a while after she left that night. I do remember I went to school the next day. It was an odd day because I was no longer just Tiffany–I was the girl whose father had just died.

Kids kept coming up to me asking if it was true. “Your dad died in a plane crash, and he was flying the plane?”

“But it wasn’t his fault,” I told them.

“Well he was the one flying the plane, so whose fault was it?” they asked

So–at seven years old it was a bit easier to just drop that subject. It’s what families and adults did back in the 1970’s when they dealt with death. Thank goodness that’s not the case now. Now we use special words that help young children move on and process their grief. I wish someone had used some of those special words with me back then.

I waited every day for years for my dad to come back from the airport after his “layover” (that’s what he called it when he was gone). He would take me to McDonalds at 8 A.M. to get a cheeseburger because his days and nights were flipped. I cherish those moments. I hold on to every memory and every photo I can get my hands on. I remember him flying over our house in a small plane he rented for the day–I waited in the driveway all morning for him to do the flyover. I also remember once he flew us in a seaplane to Catalina, the small island off the coast of Southern California, because that was the place where my parents first met.

His father was also an aviator. My grandfather was a pilot for TWA–back when flying was done in style. He was tragically killed in a helicopter accident in Texas. My dad used to proclaim, “All of the Keeles get a pilot’s license issued with their birth certificate!”

Back in high school my dad and his brother Ken would fly to NYC or Paris for 3 days because the flight was as exciting as the destination itself. They took every moment they could to go up in the air. He always told us how safe air travel was and that sixty planes take off and land every second.

The irony about the Southern Airways crash was that my mother was always extremely worried about Lyman and his combat tours in Vietnam. The tours were always very stressful for her—it was the constant thought of him being taken prisoner or blown out of the sky. I remember he tried to reassure her by saying, “I have it easy–the Marines are on the ground getting shot at, I’m just up in the sky doing my thing–and I do it well!”

Landing a fighter plane on an aircraft carrier (my dad was on the USS Hancock) is one of the hardest things to do in aviation–tougher than being in a dogfight with another plane. So after the war was over, my mom told me she was relieved and thrilled that my dad was flying with a commercial airline–how ironic! Flying was always his first love, and now it had become his day job….so life was good.

All of my Dad’s friends told me he was the most talented pilot they knew – and coming from his peers (who were also pilots) that meant a lot. I didn’t know much about the crash until about three years ago, and that was also when I started to process my grief. How can that be that it took me so long?

Well, if you stuff it down for 30 years, at some point it will bubble back up. I saw a movie with a “father/daughter” theme in 1998, and I became hysterical, inconsolable, intensely crying, and in a complete fit because it hit so close to home. I knew at the time that I should address my grief, but I just wasn’t able to do it.

I remember my mom asking me when I was headed off to USC if I needed some grief counseling because that is what people did in those days, and I said, “NO. I’m fine–its been 10 years…” She apologized for not getting me counseling when I was younger, but it just wasn’t done then.

It was when my oldest son Trent Lyman wanted to know about his grandfather and namesake that I decided to read a few articles about Flight 242. I learned that there were four “on the ground” errors that lead to the crash:

(1) There was no up to the minute weather service via fax–Delta and Eastern had that but not Southern; (2) The phone line into the back up weather service was busy, so they made a judgment call to send up Flight 242; (3) The loss of both engines was unprecedented, so they told the pilots to throttle up–NOT to throttle down. Throttling down would have cleared out the hail and allowed a restart; and (4) They were not given a vector for a safe place to land by the air traffic controller–and there WAS a vector within the distance they were able to coast the plane once they lost the engines.

So on the afternoon of April 4, 1977, during two record storms, my dad’s plane crashed on that highway in New Hope, GA, and changed that community forever.

In April of 2011 I finally got some grief counseling. I finally realized that I had never cried about the loss of my father until I was sitting in a therapist’s office. Yep, over 30 years and I never shed one tear. When a parent dies, the appropriate word to use with children is either death or died or dead–to say “passed away” isn’t final and doesn’t help the child to adjust. Grief for kids five to eight years old manifests itself in denial–I only heard, “Your dad went to fly planes in heaven…” My seven-year-old self waited quite a while for him to return so we could go to McDonalds for that cheeseburger.

To this day my charity affiliation is with Grief Counseling. I am involved with Camp Erin–a camp where kids who have lost a parent or sibling can go for a weekend of fun and healing. Grief shapes people, and I must admit it shaped me. Until I got the help I needed, I was a little colder, a little more aloof, and a little more distant from everyone.

I was always very uncomfortable when any type of plane crash made the headlines. I would even take the day off from work—I was never at ease with the topic. The way we handle and deal with grief today has changed, and I sincerely pray that the people of the New Hope community and Paulding County were able to process their grief and move forward too.

I am certain my dad used the best tools he had available at the time to safely land that plane and avoid injuring those on the ground. He was a skilled pilot, talented and precise. I am so sorry for the impact the crash had on your community.

I just want to say thank you to everybody there–thank you for pulling together that day, and for doing such an amazing job afterwards. I know my dad thanks you too.

–Tiffany Keele Grana

[FuriousResearcher]

[twayblade]

Wow

[Grimlyfe]

Damnit,.... made me tear up

[The Krokodil]

Amazing story!!! To me both The Captain and FO are hero's because they tried their best to keep everyone alive, they still got to save some passengers + the flight attendants from that Huge accident!!

Thank you Tons guys for sharing