It has been 100 years since the first airfield was established in the country town of Yeovil. Since 1915, aircraft have been designed, manufactured and tested at Westland, including the Lysander, used to transport British agents to Europe during the Second World War. In 1948 the company focused solely on helicopters and its aircraft have been sent all over the world since then, used in lifesaving with Air Ambulance and Search and Rescue and deployed...

The Boeing Stratocruiser was a double-decked luxury airliner that offered lounges and cocktails to its passengers. Pan Am Flight 202/28 had completed the first leg of its El Presidente tour before taking off in the early morning hours of April 29, 1952. Having already flown to Rio De Janeiro from Buenos Aires, Argentina, the airliner was on its way to New York with its next stop in Port of Spain, Trinidad. Pilot Albert Grossarth transmitted an "all...

A midair collision occurred near National Airport in Washington, DC on November 1, 1949. A P38 World War II plane and a commercial airliner came together when a Bolivian pilot in the P38 either did not hear air traffic controllers, or failed to respond to their commands. The crash left 53 persons dead, all of them aboard the Eastern DC4. Ironically, the P38 pilot survived the crash. He was injured severely but nevertheless was the sole survivor in...

The Standard Airliner that crashed on approach to Burbank, California on July 11, 1949 was an unscheduled New York to California flight. The Curtiss Wright C-46 crashed after beginning its descent into a cloud bank. A subsequent hearing held by the Civil Aeronautics Board considered pilot error as well as other factors. Among the oddities associated with this doomed flight was a fistfight between two passengers. This fracas occurred somewhere between...

A Flying Tiger turboprop flying east missed a runway near Burbank, California on the night of December 15, 1962. The aircraft was carrying four crew members, one passenger and toys it had obtained on a trip to Boston. Visibility was severely impeded by fog. Crashing into a neighborhood of residences and industrial buildings, fires broke out when the aircraft exploded and spilled its fuel haphazardly. Five people were killed on the ground but there...

The Strato-Freight airliner that crashed off the coast of Puerto Rico in June 1949 was a converted army transport C-46. It had once been used to carry fully armed troops. The airline company, based in Connecticut, had added room in the plane to seat more passengers. Four minutes after takeoff the plane crashed off the island's northern coast, a result of a failure of its right engine. My e-book looks at the story of an airline stewardess from Binghamtom,...

The crash of the Alaska Airlines jet into Mount Fairweather on September 4, 1971 has never been explained definitively. A National Transportation Safety Board report hinted that the flight crew acted properly with the incorrect information they were given. However the same NTSB report stated that the cockpit might have acted more responsibly to prevent a crash. The landing at Juneau Municipal Airport was inhibited by steep mountains and inclement...

Lake Pontchartrain is a saltwater lake in southeast Louisiana that is approximately 30 miles from end to end. My e-book looks at plane crashes that have occurred in the lake from 1949-2014. The majority of the crashes I have researched are small planes but there are several that I have included of a large size. One of these was an Eastern Air Lines DC-8 and the other was a B-25 Bomber. Only the DC-8 , an Eastern Air Lines flight that carried 58 passengers...

A United Airlines DC-4 crashed into Medicine Bow Peak on the night of October 6, 1955. The 12,500 summit is located in the Medicine Bow Mountain Range of Albany County, Wyoming. The accident has never been completely explained. Perhaps the likeliest explanation for the disaster is that Pilot C. C. Cooke took a shortcut to compensate for Flight 409's having been more than eighty minutes behind schedule. The airliner left Denver en route to Salt Lake...

A United Airlines DC4 airliner crashed soon after attempting to abort a takeoff at LaGuardia Airport the day before Memorial Day in 1947. On the plane included a former lieutenant on his way to wed his fiancee in Cleveland. There was also a young woman destined to visit her parents who had an important job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The plane's pilot Captain Lucky Baldwin tried to stop the plane from taking off while on his...