CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- Nearly 40 years before the grounding of the 737 Max Boeing-made aircraft following two deadly crashes, the U.S. witnessed its deadliest airplane disaster just outside Chicago's O’Hare International Airport.
WBBM Newsradio looks back and flashes forward to the positive legacy on aviation safety today because of what happened to American Airlines Flight 191 on May 25, 1979.
“It was a beautiful spring day - sunny, warm. It was the start of the Memorial Day Weekend, people were getting ready for summer. In the newsroom, well people were going off early on a Friday afternoon,” said Jim Benes.
Benes was the afternoon editor at WBBM Newsradio that Friday before Memorial Day in 1979 when he heard something come over the police scanner.
“I heard the call on the police radio. I don’t know the exact words, but I heard the words ‘crash’ and ‘O’Hare’ and after that, for me, most of everything was a blur. But, my assistant at that time, tells me that I stood up, put my hands in the air, and announced that this is happening,” Benes said.
“One of the two times in my career at WBBM that I got a chill up my spine was when Bob Crawford, our City Hall reporter, who had been sent out to a hangar at O’Hare where the ambulances were being marshalled to take the injured people away,” Benes said.
Listen below to a portion of the WBBM Newsradio coverage at the crash site.
There was a demand that the FAA ground all DC-10s. The loudest call, at the time, came from consumer advocate Ralph Nader.
“No question. Back then it took them two weeks to ground the airplane and that was seen as somewhat of a rash move at the time. Now we saw, of course the FAA really take it on the chin when they took days to ground the 737 Max. I think nowadays we just don’t have any tolerance for the loss of life and that is certainly a good thing,” he said. “But you look back then, and say ‘boy this airplane had fundamental problems’ and we took two weeks to ground it and it (DC-10) was only grounded for a month or so; and we are seeing with the 737 Max that that thing is not going to get back into the air until everyone is satisfied and the questions have been answered. And I also see how Boeing in responding so much differently than McDonnell Douglas. They are really trying to get ahead of this and to rethink the way they do training and so forth. Different world now.”
“I think if an accident like that were to occur today the site would be memorialized much different. You go out to Pennsylvania with the 911 United accident and that site is memorialized for lots of reasons, but here in Chicago when you have around 250 people killed in one accident barely gets a marker by the road – it would be certainly different today,” Schweiterman said.
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