Disasters: Tragedy in Jamaica Bay

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It was ideal flying weather. The morning was dazzlingly clear, the ceiling and visibility unlimited, and a brisk, 20-mile-an-hour wind blew from the northwest. As New York waited to welcome Astronaut John Glenn, American Airlines' Flight One—nonstop to Los Angeles—screamed down the runway of International Airport at Idlewild, consuming a normal 5,000 feet of concrete before it left the ground in a perfect takeoff. Two minutes later, the flight of American One was over—and so were the lives of its 95 passengers and crew members. It was the worst tragedy involving a single plane in the history of U.S. commercial aviation.*

Giant, Shattered Fish. As soon as it was airborne, the giant and graceful Boeing 707-120B—the latest in jetliners and the pride of American Airlines—rose dramatically, boosted by its new turbofan engines. At about 700 feet the jet banked smoothly to the left in accordance with its flight plan, then veered sharply, almost rolled over completely—and plunged nose first into the tidal marshes of Jamaica Bay.

The passengers aboard an Albany-bound plane that took off immediately after the 707 saw the horrifying scene. "It happened as if something reached up from the earth, grabbed its nose and pulled it down," said Businessman Joseph F. Farano. The jet exploded, sending a geyser of water 200 feet into the air, followed by a plume of funereally black smoke. A minute after the crash, it lay like a giant, shattered fish just beneath the transparent waters of the bay, with scattered debris and flakes of aluminum skin glinting on the tufts of marshland. The only signs of life were clouds of wheeling sea gulls, roused from a nearby bird sanctuary, and a dozen helicopters that whirled to the scene like a swarm of dragonflies.

With it into the icy waters, American One took Oilman W. Alton Jones, 70, an intimate friend of ex-President Eisenhower, who was on his way to California to join Ike on a fishing excursion, retired Admiral Richard L. Conolly, president of Long Island University and two-time Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, Film Producer (The Guns of Navarone) Irving Rubine, and Millionaire Realtor Arnold Kirkeby, former head of the Kirkeby chain of luxury hotels.† Ironically, 17 passengers had transferred to American One at the last moment, when a United Air Lines flight was canceled. So shattered were the bodies that Chief Medical Examiner Milton Helpern ruled out visual identification by relatives as "inhumane," set out to distinguish them by fingerprints and other means.