KANSAS CITY - It was 60 years ago this week in Wichita, the deadliest plane crash in Kansas history.
On a cold Saturday morning, January 16th of 1965, a U.S. Air Force Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker crashed after take-off from McConnell Air Force Base, slamming into a mostly African-American working-class neighborhood in the northeast part of Wichita. All seven crew-members on-board died, and 23 people on the ground were killed as well.
This was the deadliest aviation disaster in Kansas history, and also the second-deadliest aircraft accident in the United States involving victims on the ground (after the Green Ramp disaster in North Carolina in 1994, which killed 24 people on the ground).
The aircraft and crew were based out of Clinton-Sherman Air Force Base in west-central Oklahoma. The crew-members lost control of the plane after a malfunction of the rudder control system.
The tanker's mission that day was to refuel, in mid-air, a modified B-52 bomber that was being tested. At 9:28 a.m., the seven-year-old plane took off and gained very little altitude while climbing to about 600 feet, beginning to experience a large amount of yaw, turning to the northwest over Oliver Street, and eliciting a distress call from the captain; the crew tried to get back to the base runway. The crew then began to dump large quantities of fuel from the airplane's refueling tanks just hundreds of feet above Wichita State University.
The plane made a hard bank to the left, and began to roll. Unable to recover, the pilot made a frantic 'Mayday' call to the control tower, as the aircraft crashed in a nose-dive into a vacant lot in a neighborhood near 20th Street & Piatt (west of 21st & Grove), just three minutes after take-off, about seven miles north-northwest of its take-off from McConnell; the crash site is several blocks to the west of WSU. (Despite the horrific plane crash just blocks away, the Wichita State men's basketball team, ranked third in the nation, played later that day at the Roundhouse on campus at 21st & Hillside, with a 75-64 win vs. St. Louis.)
The aerial refueling tanker was loaded with 31,000 gallons of jet fuel, and the crash caused in a large explosion and fire which engulfed a dozen homes, creating a 15-foot-deep crater. In addition to the 30 deaths, at least 27 more people on the ground sustained injuries.
Fire crews extinguished the flames within about an hour after the crash.
It was initially reported the crew entry door was jettisoned and a B-52 Stratofortress bomber, which took off prior to the KC-135, may have blown a detached drag chute from an F-105 Thunderchief against the departing aircraft, contributing to the crash. Un-redacted portions of the accident report now indicate the parachute ingested into the Number 1 engine was that of a crew-member who attempted to bail out through the crew entry door; his body was found about 200 feet from the impact crater.
Ten months after the accident, the Air Force issued an official accident report stating the crash was caused by "a rudder control system malfunction" impossible for the crew to overcome.
Six years after the crash the Piatt Memorial Park was opened, serving as a reminder of the tragedy. In the summer of 2007, more than 42 years after the accident, an airplane-shaped 12-by-22-foot Imperial black granite monument with the names of all 30 victims of the crash inscribed on it was unveiled at a ceremony.