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| Remarkable image by Hans Wendt, who at the time of the crash was a County of San Diego County Photographer. Other images: SD news media. |
“…THIS IS IT!”—By Thomas Shess--The most memorable
day in San Diego’s collective psyche, September 25, 1978, turned out to be a
101-degree scorcher, the most stifling and smoggiest day of the year. At 9
a.m., however, the sky was clear, the temperature just hitting 80 degrees. An
idyllic California morning.
Editor’s note: The time references are for 1998, the date this
article was first published in San Diego Magazine. The report won Best of Show in the 1999 Society
of Professional Journalists for the writer.
 |
| Looking West on Dwight St. at Nile St. |
Pieces of the Cessna, with
its two-man crew, crashed at 32nd and Polk streets in the heart of North Park,
an eclectic mix of shopkeepers and working-class residents, a few miles from
the San Diego Zoo.
Ground zero for PSA’s
150,000-pound 727-214 was Dwight and Nile streets, just west of Interstate 805,
only 3 nautical miles northeast of Lindbergh Field. Flight recorder data showed
the collision happened at 1 minute, 47 seconds after 9. Flight 182’s impact
with the ground was documented 3!10ths of a second past 9:02.
From resounding collision
to fiery aftermath, the elapsed time was just 17 seconds.
Gary Jaus, a rookie cop at
San Diego Police Academy, was one of 15 in his class given the somber duty of
combing through the wreckage for anything that could be used to I.D. a victim.
Today, Jaus is a sergeant in charge of community policing.
“How much gore do you want
me to tell you about?” he asks. “There were no faces on the bodies. There were
no bodies to speak of—only pieces. One alley was filled with just arms, legs
and feet. I worked at Clairemont Mortuary before I became a cop, so I was able
to do my duty without getting sick. I was no stranger to dead bodies, but I
wasn’t ready to see the torso of a stewardess slammed against a car.”
Bodies were crushed in the
remains of an Audi, where a couple died on the spot as they were driving. One
body slammed through the windshield of a car. Blood was all over the hysterical
driver and her baby. Bodies were on rooftops. Slammed against trees. Gore was
splattered on exterior and interior walls of homes. In a small daycare center
next to ground zero, the 33-year-old caregiver and mother was killed, as were
several children.
“Man, do I have to tell you
it was horrible?” asks the veteran cop, his lower lip trembling. “It was
gruesome. The heat of the fires and the sun made the whole scene surreal. We
couldn’t drink enough water. All around us was the stench of kerosene and
burning flesh. We did our job by rote, locating the pieces so the SWAT team
could mark the spot and cover the body parts.” Shown a yellowed copy of the San Diego Evening Tribune, he notices a
story about an older woman who was talking on the phone with her sister when
the jetliner exploded on her house.
Jaus puts his hands to his
face briefly, glances out a nearby window and speaks very slowly and softly.
About noon that day, he and fellow rookie cops had stumbled on the charred door
of a gutted residence.
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| Looking south from Mission Village toward North Park across Mission Valley on day of crash |
2. Eyewitnesses and
Ironies
More than 140 eyewitnesses
to the midair collision and resulting ground-level devastation would be
documented—a chilling number, considering it almost matched the death toll. In
the end, fewer than a dozen were deemed credible.
Among those witnesses were
several on-duty firemen, who saw the disaster from two different locations.
Firefighters, along with police and surviving local residents, saved many lives
by bravely entering flaming houses to rescue trapped victims.
North Park–based Engine
Company 14 was parked at Morley Field on the northern edge of Balboa Park.
Four members of the company
(one truck) were exercising along Upas Street. Engineer/driver John Allen was
jogging when he heard a huge popping noise. It made him jerk his head around
and look up into the sky. He saw the aftermath of the midair collision, which
later reports would say was virtually head-on. Pieces of the Cessna’s propeller
were embedded in the right wing of the 727. The impact ruptured fuel and hydraulic
lines, causing a massive explosion.
Allen grabbed the two-way
radio he carried with him. He remembers being out of breath from running as he
called in one of the first eyewitness reports from the field. “Engine 14, we’re
responding,” he recalls repeating several times to a disbelieving San Diego
Fire Department dispatcher, who thought at first Allen was reporting a car
fire. Allen and the rest of his company scrambled to their truck and raced to
the fireball only blocks away.
3. The Fire Chief’s
Story
Another key set of eyes saw
the disaster seconds after the collision. “I saw something fall away from the
big plane,” remembers Robert Osby, then a battalion chief with the SDFD.
Osby was at the inferno
within minutes. En route, he was able to radio a confirmation of Allen’s call
to the fire department’s dispatch. The alertness of Station 14 provided
immediate equipment at the fire. Osby’s arrival gave needed leadership to
rescue efforts already under way.
Now San Diego’s fire chief,
61-year-old Osby is a native of San Diego and a career fireman. He graduated
from Stockton (now Martin Luther King Jr.) Memorial Academy, San Diego High and
SDSU. But nothing prepared him for what he witnessed in late September 1978.
“About 9 a.m., I was
standing outside Fire Station 28 in Kearny Mesa. I was standing with my back to
the station and facing toward Montgomery Field. We were discussing upcoming
training procedures. Nobody wanted to go inside. It was already too hot.
“Then I could see the eyes
of one of the men sort of drift away. I knew he wasn’t listening to me—so I
followed his eyes up into the sky.
“‘Oh, jeez, did you see
that!’ I shouted. “‘What was that?’ the other man demanded.
“‘Damn, the engine fell off
the wing,’ I said.
“I saw a puff of white
smoke or steam, then what I thought was an engine fell straight to the ground.
I saw it very clearly. I knew it was a jetliner, but I had no idea it was PSA.
“I saw the smoking jet
banking, turning toward the airport. It seemed to hang there for a second or
two, then it continued its banking turn for another few seconds before it
started spinning straight toward the ground.”
Osby jumped in his red car
and fumbled for his “Kojak light,” the portable emergency flasher placed on the
roof. Radioing what he saw to the dispatcher, he tore down I-805 south to the
site of black, billowing smoke. Mentally, he was setting up plans for a command
post. He knew he would likely be the first ranking fire officer to arrive.
“I parked away from the
scene,” he recalls, “far enough so I wouldn’t run over hoses on the way out.
For the fire command post, I picked a parking lot near the drugstore [Sav-On]
at University and 32nd. From there, I figured we could progress safely.
“I jogged to the scene.
From my side of the fire [north], I was ahead of any fire [department] engines,
although I could hear them approaching. I was facing a huge wall of flames, and
black smoke was everywhere. I saw a TV crew already there. I couldn’t believe
it. I saw police and residents climbing into burning houses to look for
victims. Unbelievably, I saw a U.S. Navy fire engine already on the scene. It
was trying to get water out of a hydrant, but the water main had been ruptured.
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| Crash occurred after 9 am on a Monday most had gone to work--thankfully |
Looking back from his
downtown office 20 years later, Chief Osby salutes the fire captains at the
scene. “They really didn’t need orders from me—they saw the fires, they saw the
hydrants, and they went into action, laying down lines of hoses and beginning
to fight the fires. They were able to set up an encircling perimeter around the
fire because they came from so many different directions. The crash was at the
hub of the wheel, and they targeted the flames by approaching like spokes on
that wheel.”
Much later, Osby learned
that crash investigators were amazed at how small the disaster site was. Only
two sides of one short block of Dwight Street were devastated.
My heart goes out to the
victims—but thank God firefighters saw it first and were able to arrive in time
to keep the flames from spreading for blocks and blocks. And thank God it hit
in a working-class neighborhood on a Monday morning,” he says emphatically.
“Many, many people were at work instead of in the homes that were destroyed.
Who knows how many lives were saved as a result?”
Osby vividly remembers
details that ran through his mind as he ran up to the grisly scene. “The first
thing I saw was the huge tail section that said PSA. I remember saying, ‘Damn!
That’s San Diego’s airline; that’s one of ours.’ To this day, I haven’t felt
such a sinking sensation in my stomach. I became nauseous—not because I was
starting to see dead bodies and body parts all around me, but for the simple
reason that these were living human beings only moments before.
“I could smell the kerosene
burning, could see the fire working its way through the rubble,” says Osby.
“Magnesium fires were everywhere, and they had to be left alone because water
was not going to put them out.” (Magnesium is one of the metals used by Boeing
to assemble that generation of 727s. It is still used today by the air
industry.)
“I had no hose, and because
I was a training officer, I made myself a lookout for the arriving fire crews.
I kept telling them where the downed power lines were. I remember shouting for
civilians to get away from the bodies. The neighbors just wanted to help by
putting cloths and blankets over dead bodies. But we couldn’t let them, because
there might still be pools of jet fuel or live power lines next to those
bodies. I shouted a streak to keep people away, and I know many couldn’t
understand why I was raging at them.
“Fire crews kept arriving,”
says Osby. “It was only then that I could fathom the complete destruction of
the area. San Diego was lucky the plane didn’t pancake [hit in a
parallel-to-the-ground glide path]. When the jetliner pretty much went in nose
first, it contained the fireball to a smaller area.”
Twenty years later, the
intersection of Dwight and Nile in North Park shows no outward signs of the
crash. The neighborhood was rebuilt, and people moved on. No plaques or
memorials mark the site. The only known memorial was a brass plaque hung in a
hangar at Lindbergh Field by PSA employees to remember those who died. Margery
Craig, an ex–Evening Tribune reporter and later a PSA public relations staffer,
says the plaque was ripped down when the new owners bought PSA. “I think it’s
in someone’s garage,” she says, “and that’s a shame.”
4. Media’s Story
John Britton had been on
the job five years as a TV journalist when he was assigned by the local NBC
affiliate to cover a photo-op story for Lucille Moore, then president of the
County Board of Supervisors. Channel 39 cameraman Steve Howell was with
Britton, along with a handful of other reporters. The county press event was held
at a Go-Lo service station located at University Avenue and Boundary Street,
adjacent to I-805.
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| Taken from news video later in afternoon |
The press gathering heard
the grinding crash and explosion. So did Warren McKenna, another witness, who
says the Radio Shack he was working in shook as if it were in an earthquake,
and the sound was so loud it emptied the store at I-805 and University.
Howell spun around after he
heard the initial midair collision, his camera still recording. He glanced up
and pointed his lens in the direction of the falling Cessna.
“I’m still amazed that we
got that footage,” says Britton, now a public relations spokesman for Pacific
Bell in San Francisco. That fearsome footage, a staple of countless TV stories
about the crash, no doubt will be seen often this September as the crash
anniversary is reached.
As Howell was capturing the
Cessna’s death spiral, Hans Wendt was training his 35mm camera on the flames
and trailing blue-and-white smoke streaking from the right wing of the 727. The
county photographer later discovered he had captured two vivid color
photographs of the jet’s final moments.
The following day, Wendt’s
shot appeared on page 1 of The San Diego Union and in newspapers around the
world. The all-too-vivid photo also made the cover of other publications,
including Time.
By the time Britton looked
around, Howell was running down Boundary Street with his camera continuing to
roll. Britton knew his colleague would need more film magazines, so he jumped
in his car and followed him.
“When we got there [about
three blocks away], no one—living—was around,” says Britton. “All I could see
was Steve Howell silhouetted against a 30- to 40-foot wall of flames. I
couldn’t believe he was that close!” About that time, Britton saw a policeman arrive
on foot. “We stared at each other, and without saying anything, we grabbed
Steve away from the flames.”
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| Biggest death toll in U.S. until Chicago DC-10 crash in '79 |
All day, Britton gave
reports seen around the world. “All I can remember was trying to do our job. It
was about an hour before our station had set up a live feed from a command
post. I remember Paul Bloom was the news anchor that day. He kept coming at me
for updates from the crash scene.”
Only a few blocks away from
the scene of the disaster, KSDO Radio had its headquarters. “We heard this huge
explosion,” says Hal Brown, the announcer on KSDO’s morning news program. “I
ran to part the curtains, and I caught a glint of falling metal out of the
corner of my eye. Seconds later, we heard this tremendous explosion. Somehow, I
knew there had to have been a midair collision. I interrupted CBS News to say
there was a tremendous explosion in the North Park area. I said something like
it was a midair collision and we’d get back with more details. That report hit
the airwaves about 30 seconds after the crash.”
KSDO’s news director, Joe
Gillespie, did something he knows is against unwritten broadcasting rules: He
left his on-air post. “I heard the crash, and next thing I know, I’m looking
for the keys to a station car,” he says. “I knew I had to get to the scene, and
I knew the car had a radio. Before I delegated anything, I realized that I
could probably do it faster myself. [Gillespie was the only one who knew where
the car that had the transmitting radio was parked, and he had the keys in his
possession already.] I knew we had to get something on the air. That was my
goal. I didn’t want to be there just for the sake of being first.”
Gillespie believes he was
at the crash site at Dwight and Boundary—tapes have him calling it Dwight and
Boulevard—at the west side of the devastation. Channel 39 was at the east end.
Neither Gillespie nor Britton remembers seeing the other. “My main focus was to
see what was going on, then run back to the car radio to file my dispatch,”
says Gillespie. By the time he reached the area of the crash, Gillespie had a
live feed back to Brown, who was now running solo at the microphone, with
sportscaster John DeMott working the phones.
Remarkably, Brown and
DeMott were able to get San Diego Airport manager Maurice “Bud” McDonald on the
phone to confirm that a PSA jet had crashed on approach to Lindbergh Field.
Soon, CBS News was carrying KSDO’s reports live to the nation and the world.
“Looking back, it was
depressing to keep giving the same report,” says Gillespie. “It was so damn
frustrating. There was no way anyone could have survived that inferno. I could
see the despair in the faces of the cops and the ambulance teams. The gurneys
were just hanging at their sides.”
That image is frozen
forever in Gillespie’s mind. “Paper and metal debris and body parts were all
over the place,” he says. “People were running around with garden hoses. And
all the time, the police kept pushing everyone farther and farther back. I kept
putting as many witnesses as I could find on the air. Ask me what I said, and I
would have to refer to the tapes of our broadcasts. Next thing I remember, it
was getting dark.”
The Evening Tribune heard about the crash from a telephone tip, says a
former reporter. The afternoon daily was an hour and a half from its usual deadline.
The entire newsroom quickly mobilized and managed to put a remarkably
comprehensive edition out on time.
“It was all a blur,” says
one former staffer. “We all did what we had to do.”
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| Tribune coverage earned the daily a Pulitzer Prize |
That hour-and-a-half
newsroom effort earned the Tribune
its first Pulitzer Prize.
5. A Voice from the
War Room
From the late 1940s and
into the ’50s, PSA was known affectionately as the Poor Sailor’s Airline.
Headquartered at Lindbergh Field, PSA popularized commuter flying. Few of its
flights were more than an hour long (so no meals were served), fares were
cheap, and the flying was fun.
When the jet age came to
commercial flying, PSA took to the new 737 and 727 service with its trademark
smile. It catered to the day-in-and-day-out business commuter. By 1974, the
airline had gone into a frenzy of expansion, with hotels, radio stations and big
new L-1011 jumbo jets. Then the oil crisis hit. PSA profits shrank to match the
legendary shortness of its female flight attendants’ skirts.
In 1978, Bill Hastings was
a veteran of five years in the PSA corporate public relations office. He had
gone straight from SDSU to the original low-fare “airline with a smile.” On
September 25, 1978, the PR brass had sent Hastings to Sacramento on an
early-morning flight to discuss safe flying on a TV show. When Hastings arrived
at Sacramento Metropolitan Airport, he grabbed a company line and called his
boss, Duane Youngbar, who was head of corporate PR for the publicly held
company. The time was about 9 a.m.
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| Off duty law enforcement personnel were enlisted in searching for survivors |
“Duane and I were talking
bullet points about the upcoming TV show. I heard him beg off the line for a
second. I heard garbled conversation in the background. He came back on the
line and says to me: ‘A plane has just gone down in the park’ [Balboa Park]. He
turned away, but this time I could hear him clearly.”
Hastings recalls that
Youngbar’s voice became alarmed. “‘Whose jet is it? What? Is it United’s? Is
that it? Oh, God—no, no! It’s one of ours!’”
Hastings took the next
flight back to San Diego, knowing only that one of PSA’s “grinning birds” had
gone down. “I had no details. As I sat there, my thoughts were on the disaster
plan we had on the books. I tried to recall what I had read. I couldn’t even
think because some yahoo seated nearby was complaining to anyone who would
listen how he was going to make PSA pay for having him miss the previous
flight. I wanted to get up and shake him and tell him the previous flight out
of Sacramento was 182.
“Everyone was going about
their business efficiently when I got to PSA’s PR offices,” Hastings says.
“There was tension, but it came from grief, not lack of preparation. Duane
Youngbar allowed the media into our war room as long as they didn’t get in the
way. When we had information, the media had the same information.
“I think the airline and
the city of San Diego lost its innocence that day,” Hastings muses. “Times were
different then. Less uptight. The crash of 182 changed all of us. It changed
me. PSA 182 was San Diego’s JFK. With each following disaster, we seemed a bit
more jaded.”
6. The Aftermath
“With the arrival of the
computer age, many important safety strides have been made in the airline
industry. It’s hard to pinpoint which ones are the most important,” Hastings
says.
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| Memorial is located at North Park branch of SD Public Library parking lot |
Chief Osby turns to the
large windows in his office. “One scene I can’t erase from my mind,” he says,
“is seeing baby clothes on the ground and no baby around. I saw the teddy bear,
but...” He doesn’t finish. Radio executive Joe Gillespie sums it up. “We’re
shocked by disasters, especially those that happen randomly and to total
innocents. We’re fascinated and appalled at the same time, because we know deep
down that it could have been us on that plane.”
John Britton says now he
was too busy to think about the carnage. “I was doing my job. Our cameraman
took it a bit harder. After all, his eye was the camera’s eye. He saw it all,
from the first moments to the end of that day. That was tough duty.”
Britton says Steve Howell
felt guilty accepting praise and honors for covering a story when so many
people died. “I told him there will always be accidents, and there will always
be reporters and photographers covering those stories. We just happened to be
there when it happened.
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Dwight & Nile Streets in 2010. Nose hit to the right of
tree shadow in lower right of photo; flaming wreckage
exploded west on to Dwight Street (where cars are parked.
To this day no memorial is located at the intersection.
A plaque commemorating the tragedy has been dedicated
at the North Park branch library a mile from ground zero.
|
Television brought the
Vietnam War into our living rooms. The collision of PSA’s Flight 182 and the
Cessna 172 brought a huge domestic disaster home.
It hurt us all—until
September 11, 2001.
Thomas Shess, a contributing writer to and former executive editor
of San Diego Magazine, was also editor of PSA California Magazine, the in-flight
publication during the 1970s. He is a native and resident of North Park
and founder of the North Park News.
Update: The final report on the cause of the accident is
abstracted in the following YouTube segment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=LzxeiOMC-yU&feature=endscreenIt
Right)
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