Nation: Holiday Eve Disasters

A plane crash and a dormitory fire stun two campuses

Students across the country last week were preparing to put aside their books and head home for the holidays. But the festive mood at two colleges was abruptly snapped by fiery disasters.

> The Purple Aces were the pride and passion of Evansville, Ind. Home games were often sold out. Season tickets to the best seats were so hard to come by that diehard fans fought over them in divorce settlements, and for good reason. The University of Evansville basketball team won five national small-college championships for the southern Indiana university and this year moved up into the National Collegiate Athletic Association's prestigious Division I. Evansville hired big-time Coach Bobby Watson from Oral Roberts University, recruited some hot-shooting freshmen and revived an old mascot: a cartoon riverboat gambler holding a winning poker hand of four aces. In spite of a record of one win and three losses, spirits were high as the team boarded a chartered DC-3 for the 70-min. hop to Nashville and a game against Middle Tennessee State University.

Flight 216 lifted off the runway into the rainy, foggy night and then banked left. Exactly one minute later, the plane thudded to the ground and burst into flames. The bodies of all 29 persons aboard were strewn like jackstraws around the twisted fuselage. They included 14 members of the Purple Aces, Coach Watson, the assistant director of athletics and two student managers.

Investigators for the National Transportation Safety Board immediately began trying to piece together what had happened to Flight 216. Two possibilities: engine failure or improperly stored baggage that threw the plane out of balance.

The crash was the sixth in which members of a U.S. athletic team traveling as a group were killed and the second in which an entire team was wiped out. The first was in 1961, when all 18 members of the U.S. figure-skating team perished in the crash of a chartered jet in Belgium. Federal regulations require charter pilots to pass stiff medical and flying tests and hold small charter firms to almost the same strict maintenance requirements met by big commercial carriers. The DC-3 in last week's crash was almost 30 years old but, according to officials at the safety board, appeared to have been kept in good condition by its owner, National Jet Service Inc. of Indianapolis.

After the disaster, the victims' bodies were put in rubber bags, removed from the crash site aboard a railroad boxcar and brought back to Evansville. Next morning some 1,500 students crammed into the university chapel for eulogies and prayers. On Sunday fans paid their last respects to the team at a memorial service in Roberts Stadium. The rest of the basketball season has been canceled. Said Junior Rory Hennings, 20, a close friend of four players who died: "I hadn't gotten to see them play this year because I was working the night of the only home game. Now I'm never going to see them play again."