Send us a text

It was Saturday morning, February 20, 1943. The morning fog lay thick over the prairie of northern Texas and the rolling hills of southeastern Oklahoma, clinging to the fields and tree lines like a wet gray blanket. The sun had not yet burned through the mist, and visibility in a few places was little more than a few hundred feet. At this time of year, locals in the area—farmers, mostly—were used to crisp, clear mornings or the bluster of a winter wind. But this morning was different – the fog felt like it would take a while to burn off, if it ever did.

Above that fog, somewhere in the pale early morning light, 12 small aircraft, each with a student pilot and student navigator, were flying a training mission. The young pilots, students who were early in their flight training, were searching for a break in the blanketing mist. These pilots weren’t from Oklahoma or neighboring Texas. They weren’t even American. They were young British airmen—cadets of the Royal Air Force – training thousands of miles from home.

Somewhere up there, in the limited visibility, the group of twelve airplanes got separated. There was a group of three, and then that group of three became a group of two. But soon, each of those three planes found themselves alone in the fog, each desperately looking for a way out: looking for a patch of blue sky or, perhaps, a hole in the fog so that maybe they could take a chance at an emergency landing – somewhere; anywhere. Two of the twelve planes crashed in the fog that day. Four RAF cadets, a pilot and navigator in each plane, perished in the Oklahoma mountains.

This is the story of those British pilot cadets who crashed on February 20, 1943, and a training program that brought a small piece of London, England, to a small Texas town named Terrell. In addition to the burial of the four British cadets, it also brought a memorial that was erected nearly 60 years later, by students of a different kind: Elementary school students who learned of the nearby airplane crashes in their reading class at school.

Send us a text

On Saturday, December 28, 1946, a Lockheed Constellation airliner, known as the Cairo Skychief, was beginning the landing sequence at Shannon Airport on the western coast of Ireland. It was 2 o’clock in the morning so, naturally, it was dark. But it was also quite cloudy with low ceilings, fog and light rain – the visibility of the crew was restricted quite a bit. But this crew was experienced and the airport, despite being relatively new, was well known amongst international aircrews, as it was – and is – used regularly for both westbound and eastbound Transatlantic air traffic. Its location puts it in line with most direct flights to and from Canada and the United States.

Yet oddly, as the crew was given clearance to land by the Shannon control tower and the plane turned toward the runway, the lights of the airport went dark. As the pilot struggled to compute this unprecedented turn of events, the left wingtip struck the ground. The aircraft then quickly crashed and caught fire.

Like so many other aircraft accidents that are featured here on Radar Contact Lost, the weather at the time of the crash played a key role, yet it was not the sole cause – or even the primary cause of the crash. It would take months for investigators to understand what happened, but when the accident report was completed and made public, and the primary cause of the crash was revealed, it became clear that there was something much more significant than the weather that caused this crash. Of all the aviation accidents we’ve looked at on this podcast, we’ve never had a primary cause of an aviation accident like this one.

Send us a text

It was the early morning hours of Wednesday, August 14, 2013, when a United Parcel Service cargo jet slammed into the ground about one mile short of the runway at the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport, in Birmingham, Alabama, located in the southeastern United States.

Even though the plane was more than a mile from the airport, the crash occurred on undeveloped airport property – the plane did not crash into a neighborhood or a business district, or land on a highway; the pilot and co-pilot were killed, but there were no other fatalities or injuries related to this crash.

Though the low clouds in the area certainly contributed to this crash by visually obscuring the airport from the crew, there were plenty of other things that added to a list of crash-contributors, including several mistakes made by the captain and the first officer, as well as the dispatcher for United Parcel Service. Take the weather out of the equation, and all the other errors that brought down this Airbus were the result of mistakes made by aviation professionals.

Like so many other aircraft accidents that are featured here on Radar Contact Lost, this was a needless and avoidable crash. The sequence of events that led to this crash began before the plane ever took-off.