On January 13, 1982, an Air Florida Boeing 737-222 plunged into
the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., killing 78 people. The
crash, caused by bad weather, took place only two miles from
the White House.

The Air Florida flight took off from Washington National Airport
in Arlington, Virginia, with 74 passengers and 5 crew members
on board. The plane had flown into Washington from Miami in
the early afternoon and was supposed to return to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, after a short stop.

However, snow in Washington temporarily closed the airport and
when it reopened, the plane was de-iced with chemical anti-freeze,
but the plane still had difficulty moving away from the gate due to
the ice. When it eventually made it to the airport’s only usable
runway, it was forced to wait 45 minutes for clearance to take
off.

Not wanting to further delay the flight, the pilot, Larry Wheaton,
did not return for more de-icing, and worse, failed to turn on the
plane’s own de-icing system.

ED DANAHUE

Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins is 86 years old today.

Hopkins has received numerous accolades, including two 
Academy Awards, four BAFTA Awards, two Primetime
Emmy Awards, and a Laurence Olivier Award. He has also
received the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2005 and the BAFTA
Fellowship for lifetime achievement in 2008.

1991

December 28, 1978

United Airlines Flight 173 was a scheduled flight from John F.
Kennedy International Airport in New York City to Portland
International Airport in Portland, Oregon, with a scheduled
stop in Denver, Colorado.

On Thursday, December 28, 1978, the aircraft flying this route
ran out of fuel while troubleshooting a landing gear problem
and crashed in a suburban Portland neighborhood near NE
157th Avenue and East Burnside Street.

(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

The crash site as it looks today.

On its final approach to Madison, Wisconsin on December 10,
1967, the private plane carrying soul-music legend Otis Redding 
(26)crashed into the frigid waters of a small lake three miles short         
of the runway, killing seven of the eight men aboard, including
Redding. “Sittin’ On The Dock Of The Bay”, which he had been
recording, would be released in its “unfinished” form several
weeks later, with Redding’s whistled verse a seemingly
indispensable part of the now-classic record and would soon
become history’s first posthumous #1 hit and the biggest pop
hit of Redding’s career.       

In the summer of 1977, members of the rock band Aerosmith
inspected an airplane they were considering chartering for
their upcoming tour—a Convair 240 (above) operated out of
Addison, Texas. Concerns over the flight crew led Aerosmith
to look elsewhere. a decision that saved one band but doomed
another. The aircraft in question was instead chartered by the
band Lynyrd Skynyrd, who were just setting out that autumn
on a national tour that promised to be their biggest to date.

On October 20, 1977, however, during a flight from Greenville,
South Carolina, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s
tour plane crashed in a heavily wooded area of southwestern 
Mississippi during a failed emergency landing attempt, killing
band-members Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines and Cassie
Gaines as well as the band’s assistant road manager and the
plane’s pilot and co-pilot. Twenty others survived the crash.