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The morning was foggy and visibility was extremely low in Boston, Massachusetts. On a normal day, if one stands at the pier on Castle Island, a peninsula at the end of the South Boston neighborhood of that Hub of New England, one can watch various commercial aircraft take off and land at Logan Airport.
July 31, 1973, in the heart of the New England Summer was one of those days when sound pierced the clouds covering the city including the peninsula, the airport and the harbor. Planes taking off and landing were hidden to the naked eye by a blanket of fog.
Routine flight and an unscheduled stop
Delta Flight 173 was making its morning landing coming from Burlington, Vermont by way of an unscheduled stop in Manchester, New Hampshire . Due to the fog covering much of the New England area, the DC-9 with 88 souls on board had to pick up other passengers from a previously canceled flight in the Granite State. Essentially, the aircraft was transporting passengers from the west extreme, almost, of New England to the mid shoreline of the Northeastern group of 6 states by way of the almost center of the region.
According to previous passengers, the pilot was experienced in flying them South during the winter and North in the Spring. He was a former Northeast Airlines pilot who transported many “snowbirds” to Florida. A snowbird is a resident of the North until winter and then lives in the South.
Delta Airlines bought Northeast in 1972 and through the purchase entered the Boston market. Many of those pilots now flew for a growing airline out of the South.
Flight 173 was a DC-9 built six years earlier.
It would seem to be a routine landing on Boston’s Logan Airport landing on runway 4R jutting out into the harbor, away from the famous Mystic Tobin bridge and gateway to the western parts of the metro area.
Fog hid it all
However, at the last moment, the simple easy flight from Burlington ended instantly in disaster. The landing gear hit a seawall at the end of the runway and the whole plane flipped, crashed and disintegrated. Ultimately, all passengers would die with one hanging on for five months until he finally succumbed to his injuries in December. The fog would do more than contribute to the destruction and death of the aircraft and passengers. Visibility was so poor that the plane tragedy went unknown for nine minutes. Only when others on scene for unrelated work came upon the destruction were the authorities notified.
Boston Globe Reporter Robert B Carr (my father) received the assignment to go to the scene and cover the crash for the newspaper. The Boston Globe was once the premier newspaper of Boston, owned by the Taylor family. Located several miles away from the pier at the end of Castle Island, the newspaper headquarters on Morrissey Boulevard was in a perfect spot for those reporters and employees from the local Dorchester and South Boston neighborhoods of Boston. Hated by some and loved by others, it was a star in the golden era of newspapers when they published a daily and evening edition.
The newspaper sent Carr to the pier at Castle Island and chartered a boat for him to cross the harbor, he was the first reporter on the scene.
The only information anyone knew at the time was that the plane flipped and basically disintegrated at the end of runway 4 in the extreme fog. It would be a while before the NTSB would discover why.
My father described the scene to us as too gruesome and never talked about it.
Clearly, the pilot with his history of flying Boston-based Northeast Airlines knew the approach to Logan. That airline marketed as flying Yellow-Birds — their yellow planes — flew many direct flights from Boston to Miami and other points in Sunshine State.
However, with the fog as bad as it was, the crew on the flight deck could not see how they were enough off-track to come in short of the runway.
Further, Boston has one of the tallest airport towers in the nation — in the case of fog that can be and was a great disadvantage.
The crash was brutal and all but two died on impact. One other passenger died two hours later and another twenty-year-old Sargeant Leopold Chouinard, was the only passenger to survive the crash. He died five months later — finally succumbing to his horrible injuries including burns over 80 percent of his body. His death left the crash with no survivors. News reports updated viewers and readers daily on his condition.
A bumped switch
According to the National Transportation Safety Board report issued in 1974, the prime cause of the crash was a switch that was in the wrong selection and caused the aircraft to be in a mode that prepares to abort a landing.
The fog made the landing approach difficult and normally the plane would be in an instrument landing approach. The plane navigational system has a setting for that reason and the plane would come in basically with the pilots blind to the runway until they reach a distance and altitude in which the runway was now visible to land. The switch on the DC-9 had the ILS approach setting and then a Go Around setting to abort the flight.
According to the NTSB report, the switch between the ILS and G/A setting had been bumped in such a way that apparently, the pilots were unaware they were on the wrong setting — G/A. This led them to a glideslope that was too low, leaving the plane in danger of landing short of the runway.
When one looks at the cause, a switch in the wrong place and pilots who were not aware, you can realize the need for attention to detail. In today’s technical environment, one switch can cause destruction or just an agonizing delay of a project. Knowing your equipment when all is going well, and when all around you is chaos can make a huge difference in stressful times.
Attention to detail
The copier machine set on black and white when you want color, the transmission set for second gear on automatic transmission not on drive and automatic coffee pot set for eight cups when the vessel under the spout only holds four are all minor incidents of varying degrees of damage from none but time loss to property damage. They all lean back to attention to detail.
In the case of Flight 173, the NTSB reported no one noticed the ILS/Go Around switch was set to the wrong position and that they believe it was a simple bumping that caused it. The result was a perfect set of conditions that turned this into a disaster. Attention to detail can always prevent this but it can be difficult in today’s technical world.
Flight 173 left no survivors despite an experienced crew in landing at Boston’s Logan Airport. Ironically, it was a switch that contributed most to the crash simply in the wrong position creating a disaster of tragic proportions.
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