Devastating crash at O'Hare 30 years ago leaves legacy of safety

If you think the news is dark these days, try going back 30 years, when on May 25, 1979, it must have literally seemed as if the sky was falling with the crash of American Airlines Flight 191 just outside O'Hare International Airport.

The Chicago area had just endured one of the harshest winters on record, one that had swept out Chicago Mayor Michael Bilandic and replaced him with Jane Byrne, a winter that had also seen 29 bodies dug out from under John Wayne Gacy's home.

The economy was in turmoil, with long lines at the limited number of gas stations that were open and inflation surging toward double-digit levels.

The Islamic revolution was in full swing in Iran, with street demonstrations that would lead to the hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy in October. In March, the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island, Pa., had suffered a partial meltdown. The anxious public mood was reflected in feature films like "The China Syndrome" and the original "Alien."

And just when things seemed on the verge of a spring revival, on a sunny Friday to open the Memorial Day weekend with temperatures hovering around 70, with Arlington Park set to open its 53rd season and Arlington Lakes Golf Club opening for the first time, it happened. An American Airlines DC-10, Flight 191 bound for Los Angeles, fell from the sky and crashed in an unincorporated area between Des Plaines and Elk Grove Village, not a mile from the O'Hare runway where it had taken off, killing 273 persons.

The disaster did trigger something of a revival, in the form of improved air safety resulting from the detective work to determine just how it happened. If 30 years later AA Flight 191 remains the worst aviation accident on U.S. soil, that's a good thing.

Flight 191 took off just after 3 p.m. on May 25, 1979. In the process, however, it lost the engine off its left wing, dropped behind on the runway. Nevertheless, the plane reached an altitude of 325 feet before abruptly rolling left and diving into what had once been Ravenswood Airport, just short of a mobile-home park and a field of Amoco Oil fuel tanks beyond. With its own tanks topped off for a flight to the West Coast, the plane exploded in a fireball that witnesses said could be seen in the Loop. It incinerated everything and everyone onboard, 271 persons, and two more on the ground in a converted hangar belonging to the Courtney-Velo Excavating Co. at 320 W. Touhy Ave.

The first responders on the scene later said they had trouble finding the crash site until the smoke cleared and they realized they were standing in the midst of it, that there was next to nothing left.

Officer Ken Burger, of the Chicago Police Canine Training Facility that is still there on that stretch of Touhy, later described "an acrid smell in the air - of burning fuel, burning flesh," and paramedic John Heavey said he saw only parts of bodies, soaked in fuel.

Hospitals were put on alert and ambulances rushed to the scene, but as later with Sept. 11 - the world's worst aviation disaster as a willful terrorist attack - they waited for patients that never came; there were no survivors.

The Rev. Richard Homa left St. Zachary Catholic Church in Des Plaines to rush over to administer last rites, only to be greeted by a doctor who walked past him with black bag in hand saying, "Father, there's nothing we can do."

The question was what had been done, and how had it happened?

The powerful McDonnell Douglas DC-10, counterpart to the Boeing 747, had been designed to take off and fly in the event of a failure of one of its three engines.

The crew was highly experienced: flight engineer Alfred Udovich, 56, co-pilot James Dillard, 49, and Capt. Walter Lux, 53, who had accepted the assignment at the last moment in a swap with another pilot.

Flash content