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It's time for Kate Fons, an aspiring flight attendant aboard PSA Flight 182 to San Diego, to start dreaming of future trips to exotic destinations.
San Diego Airplane Crash
Time for Martin Kazy Jr. and David Boswell scans the instruments of a Cessna 172 during a landing approach practice at Lindbergh Field.
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It's time for Vernon Franck, Seabee, to start another routine day at Naval Amphibious Base Coronado.
There was still time to prevent what became one of San Diego's most burning tragedies and the worst plane crash in US history to date.
There wasn't much time though. In less than two minutes, at 9:01:47 AM, the PSA 182 and the Cessna will collide in mid-air, 2,600 feet above North Park.
The impact tore apart the smaller aircraft and damaged the jet's right wing. Both planes fell out of the sky, crashing into residential streets, littering residences, cars and sidewalks with aircraft parts, corpses and flames, destroying or damaging 22 homes.
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There would be 144 dead: seven San Diegans on the ground, two Cessna passengers, and 135 aboard the jet.
"It was awful," said Verna Huger, 85, who opened the front door to see a neighboring house in flames, smoke and ash choking the sky. "That was awful."
Tuesday will mark the 40th anniversary of the PSA crash. For most San Diegan residents, this is ancient history, as more than half of the county's current population was born after this date. However, for those who were there, the memories are still vivid.
"I spent 30 years in the Naval Reserve and was deployed to the Persian Gulf four times," said Dr. Jerry Wisniew, who worked at the temporary mortuary set up that day in St. Augustine. "I've seen a lot of injuries, but nothing like what I saw in a plane crash."
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The disaster cast a long shadow. The manslaughter lawsuits tied up local courts for months as bereaved relatives sued the federal government, Pacific Southwest Airlines and Gibbs Flying Service, the local flight school that operated the ill-fated Cessna and employed Kazy.
And the crash permanently changed aviation in San Diego. The dogged investigator fought for major revisions to the official report of the National Transportation Safety Board, leading to the introduction of new rules to regulate flight operations here.
In the flight footage of the doomed jet, keys are exchanged in the cockpit about half a minute before impact.
In fact, they quickly got off the plane. The initial NTSB report focused on PSA's failure to track down the Cessna. It was a serious mistake, agreed Stephen K. Cusick, who was a naval aviator before becoming a flight safety expert and lead author of the Commercial Aviation Safety textbook.
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"People think it's binary, you either crash or you land safely and that's it," Cusick said. "But it's not like that. It's every flight, every flight where the pilot has to use every means to mitigate safety issues, that is to close every hole in Swiss cheese."
The Swiss Cheese accident avoidance theory, popularized by the British psychologist James Reason, argues that every person and system is fallible. Disaster can be avoided by recognizing inherent weaknesses and compensating for them by sealing the "holes" in the "Swiss cheese".
Catastrophic failures occur when holes in multiple layers overlap. That's what happened in San Diego 40 years ago, said Cusick, a student of this accident.
PSA 182 was established as the first flight from Sacramento to Los Angeles, then continued from Los Angeles. to San Diego. That fall morning, the Santa Ana winds blew away the usual sea layer. It might have been the first piece of Swiss cheese: the glow in the cloudless sky obscured visibility.
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Another fun fact: air traffic controllers emphasized the look-and-avoid principle, whereby pilots visually track other planes and maintain a safe distance. Whatever the people in the PSA cockpit thought they saw, it wasn't a Cessna safely passing the jet.
Another fun fact: Nineteen seconds before the impact, an alarm sounded at the San Diego Approach Control Center at Naval Air Station Miramar as the letters "CA" appeared on the instrument panel, meaning "Conflict Alert." The alarm was automatically triggered by radar showing the flight paths of the PSA 182 and the approaching Cessna.
However, no aircraft were alerted. The system had become operational just seven weeks earlier and was already averaging 13 conflict alerts a day, and in each case the pilots took action to avoid a disaster without any pressure from the control tower.
Another interesting fact: Cessna, for unknown reasons, deviated from the approved course, turning into the path of the descending PSA 182.
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Was it "You think this is happening to our right" or "You think this is happening to our right"? The former would indicate that the aircraft may have seen a smaller aircraft.
"PSA said it saw the plane, after which the controller relaxed and was no longer concerned," Cusick said. “There are a lot of blind spots – you see something for a while and then you lose sight of it. And Cessna couldn't see because PSA was going down on it."
More stacked slices: The Cessna was yellow, hard to see when looking down at rooftops and roads; PSA may have mistaken another small plane for a Cessna; The PSA crew was getting ready to land, busy time on board the plane.
"Lindbergh Field is a dangerous airport anyway." Kusick said. “You have a very steep slope leading down the hill. It's very cramped."
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Four seconds after the collision, the men in the cockpit can be heard realizing that a tragic mistake has been made.
There would be no heroic deeds of Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, nothing like the "Miracle on the Hudson." The Cessna disintegrated on contact with the jetliner, a Boeing 727-124, which was about 90 times heavier than a two-seater.
Steve Howell, covering a nearby press conference for NBC 7/39, pointed the camera up and captured pieces of the Cessna (and what appeared to be a body) falling to the ground. One of the Cessna's occupants broke through the roof above the front porch of a house in the 3300 block of Polk Street; the other was still in the taxi when it hit the pavement at Polk's 3100 block.
Also nearby was Hans Wendt, San Diego County's chief photographer at the time. He broke PSA 182 banked at a sickening 50 degree angle, with his right wing on fire. (This iconic photo made the front pages of both the San Diego Union and the San Diego Evening Tribune the next day. The Trib's coverage of the disaster, compiled in a matter of hours, won a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting.)
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"Zero," Cusick said. “Because of the way it crashed, it messed up the flight controls. He's lost control."
Underneath the stricken plane, North Park residents prepared for a hot day. It was already 82 degrees at 9am when Cheryl Walker dropped off her 3-year-old son Derek at preschool at Nancy Stout's home.
Without warning, PSA 182 slashed through the roof of a house on Nile Street and exploded at the intersection of Dwight and Nile.
The force of the impact killed everyone aboard the jet. Three jet engines, landing gear, wing sections, body parts, and other debris ejected from the 727 and then rained fire down on Dwight, Nile, and Boundary Streets. Some houses were set on fire; others, including that occupied by Nancy Stout Nursery, were torn apart by shrapnel.
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Huger, whose home is less than half a block from the crash site, was in the backyard. "I heard the shock," he said. "It looked like a break in the 2v4 board."
Running to his yard, he saw a neighbor's house to the south engulfed in flames. In fact, fires broke out around his house.
About 60 percent of San Diego's fire department units rushed to the scene. The police also arrived, recovering the bodies and fueling the occasional glimmer of hope.
On Límit Street, Officer P.L. Thornton stumbled upon a sedan that crashed as the body flew through the windshield.
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"The glass just exploded and everything inside was covered in glass shards and blood," Thornton told a reporter. “We thought they were all dead.
But when police pulled the torso aside, they found the driver, Mary Fuller of Lakeside, and her infant son. Cut through glass, they bled but lived.
It was Vernon Franck's job to prevent more casualties. With three other Seabees, he traveled from Coronado to North Park and volunteered for his services. Placed at the end of an alley, it was ordered to prevent people from approaching the fires.
"I remember stopping a woman who begged me that her mother's house was on fire," he said. "We saw it roar, fully explode, burst right behind us and you could feel the heat."
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Black clouds hung over North Park, sending a grim alarm to the entire city. Deirdre Kavanagh Bramberg, then a student at the University of San Diego, understood
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