The Crash of the Boston Electra / Michael N

The Story of Man and Bird in Conflict BirdThe Crash of theStrike Boston Electra michael n. kalafatas Bird Strike The Crash of the Bird Boston Electra Strike michael n. kalafatas Brandeis University Press Waltham, Massachusetts published by university press of new england hanover and london Brandeis University Press Published by University Press of New England One Court Street, Lebanon NH 03766 www.upne.com © 2010 Brandeis University All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by Katherine B. Kimball Typeset in Scala by Integrated Publishing Solutions University Press of New England is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper. For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Kalafatas, Michael N. Bird strike : the crash of the Boston Electra / Michael N. Kalafatas. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-58465-897-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Aircraft bird strikes—Massachusetts— Boston. 2. Aircraft accidents —Massachusetts— Boston. 3. Electra (Turboprop transports) I. Title. TL553.525.M4K35 2010 363.12Ј465—dc22 2010013165 5 4 3 2 1 Across the veil of time, for the passengers and crew of Eastern Airlines Flight 375, and for my grandchildren: may they fl y in safe skies The bell- beat of their wings above my head. —w. b. yeats, “The Wild Swans at Coole” Contents Preface: A Clear and Present Danger xi 1. Appointment in Samarra 1 2. Crimson Sunset 5 3. Fading October Light 25 4. The Case of the Boston Electra 59 5. Sharing the Skies: The Problems 92 6. Sharing the Skies: The Solutions 131 7. The Making of a Patron Saint 143 Epilogue: Mozart and the Starling 167 Acknowledgments 169 Vital Statistics of the Boston Electra 173 Select Bibliography 175 Illustrations follow page 98 Preface: A Clear and Present Danger I write this on the fi rst anniversary of the so- called miracle on the Hudson, when a brilliant pilot and Lady Luck, with fi ne teamwork, glided a powerless giant airliner to a safe landing on a great American river, six minutes after takeoff. Captain Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger and Lady Luck saved the lives of 155 passengers and crew—better known as loved ones to those who pine for them when away, praying for their safe return. The miracle on the Hudson should have been an alarm call, awak- ening us to the danger of catastrophic airliner crashes caused by bird strike. Relying on miracles—the confl uence of a pilot with decades of glider experience, a glass- fl at river, a fl eet of ferry boats at the ready— is not sound transportation safety policy. The event described in this book—the downing of a Lockheed Electra by a fl ock of 10,000 starlings in 1960—remains, as of this writing, the worst aviation disaster caused by bird strike. In that crash sixty- two people died; ten survived because of the heroism of ordinary citizens, many of them young boys. Its place in history is likely to be supplanted soon by a far worse aviation disaster, for reasons described in this book. Indeed, one could have happened on January 15, 2009. It is rare that an author can write simultaneously about a historical event that happened half a century ago and a clear and present danger today. The reasons for that danger are many; here are just two. First, the populations of thirteen of the fourteen largest birds found in North America are dramatically on the rise; any one of these birds is capable of shutting down a modern jet engine. Typically these birds fl y in fl ocks—as was the case when Captain Sullenberger’s US Air- ways Flight 1549 struck the fl ock of Canada geese. Second, in a quiet but dangerous revolution, in one generation the airlines have shifted away from use of jetliners powered by three or four engines to jetliners powered by two engines. It is far easier for birds to disable a plane with two engines than one with four engines. Redundancy in jet engines increases the probability that an aircraft would not be left powerless after a bird strike and can make a safe emergency landing at an airport possible. Part of this book is the amazing story of the crash of the Lockheed Electra, the heroism of citizens, and the greatest rescue mobilization Boston has ever witnessed. The rest of the book explores how we can fi nd a better way to share the skies with the avian life we so longed to be like when we fi rst took to the skies in powered fl ight at Kitty Hawk. xii « Preface: A Clear and Present Danger Bird Strike 1 Appointment in Samarra What happens when dreams collide? On June 13, 1923, the fi rst plane touched down on the 1,500-foot cinder runway of tiny Boston Airport, built by the U.S. Army on 189 acres of tidal fl ats in East Boston. Two decades earlier the Wright brothers had achieved humankind’s dream to defy gravity and reach for the sun- split clouds. Amazingly, for thirty- seven years Boston’s airport, one of the nation’s busiest, did not see a single fatality from a commercial aviation crash. In 1943 the airport was renamed Logan after a distinguished Boston public servant—General Edward Law- rence Logan—who reportedly never fl ew in an airplane. On the warm and golden afternoon of October 4, 1960, Logan Air- port’s innocence came to a ghastly end. As families along Winthrop Harbor sat down to supper and as I arrived at my job of soda jerk in South Boston, across the cheerful blue waters of Boston Harbor from the airport, a Lockheed Electra taking off slammed into a fl ock of ten thousand starlings and another human dream: one man’s determina- tion to bring to the United States all the songbirds that dart across the pages of Shakespeare’s plays. That collision of dreams would take sixty- two lives and give rise to some of the greatest heroism Boston has ever witnessed—including the heroism of children. A Feathered Bullet A New York drug manufacturer, Eugene Schieffelin, released sixty Eu- ropean starlings into Central Park in 1890, and forty more birds a year later. The experiment was a stunning success: today there are 200 million starlings in North America, here because of a fl eeting reference in Henry IV to the starling’s ability to mimic the human voice. Like a fl ight of swallows or an exaltation of larks, a group of starlings has a special name: a murmuration of starlings. The birds mimic whatever they hear—voices, telephones, car alarms, barking dogs, other birds—and their song is a medley of squeaks, clicks, whistles, and other interpretations of the world of sound. An average starling weighs only 2.82 ounces, about the heft of a cellphone, but in fall and winter starlings swarm together in enor- mous fl ocks containing up to a million birds, and they wheel in fl ight with military precision. Fast- fl ying and relatively dense, a single starling can be a feathered bullet; a swarm of the birds is a feathered fusillade. After a day’s foraging—fi nding their food on the ground, up to seventy miles away—they splash clean in water, if they can, and return to their roost at sunset. Before Boston’s Big Dig, 160,000 would fl y at sunset to a favorite roost on the Tobin Bridge, jostling for a spot and murmuring away at evening commuters. Perhaps that’s where the birds were bound that fateful fall day in 1960. On October 4, a half- hour before sunset and before the rise of a blood-red harvest moon, Eastern Airlines Flight 375, a four-engine Lock heed Electra turboprop—bound for Philadelphia; Charlotte, North Carolina; Greenville, South Carolina; and Atlanta, Georgia—rose from Runway 9 with seventy- two souls on board. Among them were fi fteen newly- sworn- in marines en route to training at Parris Island, South Carolina; Philadelphians headed home after a shoe convention in Boston; baseball fans on their way to the World Series in Pittsburgh, where the Pirates would play the Yankees (Art Ditmar, born in Win- throp, Massachusetts, would be opening pitcher for the Yanks and would last only a third of an inning); and an engineer with top- secret plans for a new missile system sealed in a specially locked briefcase. Ted Williams, who six days earlier had bade Boston adieu with a home run in his last at bat, was a near miss to be on the fl ight. Twenty- seven seconds after it began its takeoff and only seven seconds into the fl ight, the Lockheed Electra took a fusillade of feathered bullets into three of its four engines. It was a fatal shooting. Whipped in through air scoops, starlings jammed the jet compressors and blades of the turbines (from turbo, the Latin for “whirl”), whose job it was to spin freely—as jet exhaust roared past them—to 2 « bird strike power the plane’s propellers and power and cool its compressors. A turboprop is a hybrid, part jet and part propeller, a design that is still in use, and effi cient and economical in regional air traffi c.

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