Eastern Air Lines Flight 537 Crash
At the time it was the deadliest airliner incident in US history
A 1949 mid-air collision between a fighter plane and a passenger airliner approaching the Washington National Airport took 55 lives.
On November 1, 1949, Eastern Air Lines Flight 537 from Boston to DC crashed in mid-air with a Lockheed P-38 Lightning being test-flown by the Bolivian government. The crash occurred half a mile South West of the runway at Washington National Airport. All 55 passengers and crew on the Eastern airliner were killed. The pilot of the P-38 was seriously injured.
At the time it was the deadliest airliner incident in US history. Eastern Airlines Douglas DC-4 that crashed into the Potomac River after a midair collision with a U.S. Air Force P-38.
Glen Tigner, 21, an air traffic controller on duty at the National Airport Tower on Nov. 1, 1949, sounded the crash alarm. ``Turn left! Turn left!’’ Tigner had radioed moments earlier as a Bolivian Air Force fighter on a practice run veered toward a commercial flight on approach to the airport from the south.
The Eastern Airlines Flight had originated in Boston and made a stopover in New York. Among the dead were U.S. Representatives George Bates of Massachusetts, Michael Kennedy of New York and Helen Hopkinson, a cartoonist for New Yorker magazine. Flight 537’s final destination was supposed to be New Orleans.
The Bolivian aircraft was a single-seat P-38 Lockheed Lightning and had just been purchased from the U.S. government. At 11:56 hours, the fighter slammed into the Douglas DC-4. "The Eastern Airline pilot tried to swerve the big DC-4 plane from the path of the fighter, but was too late. The fighter ripped into it from above and from the side. The tail of the commercial airliner just missed the Mount Vernon Memorial Highway, near Four Mile Run.
An account by the Arlington Fire Journal described the scene. Firefighters opened the fuselage with special tools in the hope of finding survivors but there were none. Some firefighters gathered personal effects from the knee-deep water and muck. ``The river was very shallow there,’’ said Harold LeRoy, a veteran Arlington volunteer firefighter.
The Bolivian Ambassador explained to the press that the experienced military pilot had been dealing with an engine malfunction and didn’t hear the air traffic controller’s alarm.
This would not be the last air traffic calamity to touch Arlington or National Airport but it was the biggest to date in American history.
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