Dozens of passengers died on impact. The rest faced another deadly threat: ‘Dante’s Inferno’

Part 2 of 5

For the passengers of Eastern Air Lines Flight 212 — headed from Charleston, S.C., to Charlotte on Sept. 11, 1974 — nothing seemed wrong at 7:33 a.m.

By 7:34, all hell had broken loose.

More than three miles short of the Charlotte runway, the plane was just a few dozen feet above the ground. What happened next was the stuff of nightmares, a crash that would kill most of the people on board and haunt its 10 survivors for decades.

First, the DC-9’s right wingtip struck a series of limbs on trees less than three stories tall. Then the left wing, only 16 feet above the ground, sheared off a cluster of pine treetops.

For most of those on board, this violent scrape with the trees was the first indication that the flight was in trouble. Flight attendant Colette Watson, in the front of the plane on a jump seat that faced the passengers, felt a jolt as the wings struck the branches and treetops, but wasn’t sure what it meant.

Co-pilot Jim Daniels, who had been flying the plane from the right seat of the cockpit while Captain James Reeves supervised him, tried to pull it up at the last second. But the plane was traveling 193 mph and weighed 90,000 pounds, so there was no chance. The plane was too fast, too heavy and too low.

In the next instant, the bottom of it burrowed through the red clay.

Bob Burnham, who had a three-month-old daughter and had been headed for a job interview in Washington, D.C., was seated near the back in a window seat on the right side. His head slammed into the window on impact. The blow briefly knocked him out.

The skidding plane plowed through more pine and oak trees before careening through a cornfield, shedding parts and flattening stalks by the hundreds. Shocked passengers screamed in pain as they were thrown from side to side in the chaos.

Charles Weaver, a Charleston businessman seated about five rows from the back, squeezed his eyes shut. “This tremendous noise, the topsy-turvy, the twisting… I was waiting, I guess, for death,” Weaver said.

Then came another patch of trees. Metal shrieked. The wings ripped away as they hammered into the small forest.

The plane broke into pieces and came to rest in that second patch of woods, having left a trail of destruction longer than three football fields. Of the 82 on board the nearly full DC-9 — 78 passengers and four crew members — 32 lives had already been extinguished by the time the plane shuddered to a stop.

But this still left 50 desperate passengers facing a fresh, lethal and fast-spreading threat:

Fire.

The DC-9 had 17,500 pounds of jet fuel in the tanks when it left Charleston. The 35-minute flight burned 4,500 pounds of that, but 13,000 remained. And because the tanks were ruptured, within seconds, the plane was engulfed in flames.

‘Smoking saved my life’

The plane’s 1,000-foot skid through the cornfield and the trees had torn it into three sections: the cockpit and the first few rows; a large middle segment of the fuselage that contained the majority of the 78 passengers; and the final few rows plus the plane’s tail, which had broken off and spun in wildly looping circles before coming to a stop.

Roy Hendrix and his fellow Navy officer, Jim Schulze, had picked seats together in the smoking section, in the back of the plane, because Hendrix smoked.

Hendrix was reading a newspaper when the plane crashed. Thrown upside down after their seats came loose, Hendrix and Schulze fell onto each other on the plane’s floor. Hendrix was wearing Navy khakis, and the raging fire caused part of his uniform to literally melt into his skin. The same thing happened to dozens of passengers, many wearing clothing made of manmade fabrics like polyester, a far more flammable material than cotton.

The two Navy buddies were able to pick themselves up and find a hole in the fuselage, squeezing through it and crawling out toward safety.

Hendrix would later learn that while fire had sprouted everywhere, it was deadliest in the cabin’s middle section — which was primarily the non-smoking coach section of the flight.

For decades after that, whenever Hendrix’s family would try to get him to stop smoking, he’d say, “Why would I stop smoking? Smoking’s the only reason I’m here today. I’m one of the few guys in the world who can say smoking saved my life.”

‘We’ve gotta get out of here’

When the plane stopped skidding, Richard Arnold was squarely in the middle of one of the many fires.

From his seat, the 31-year-old IBM systems engineer saw the green branch of a tree next to him. Before his eyes, all of its leaves shriveled to black. In that instant, he knew he needed to hold his breath to avoid inhaling smoke, or worse, fire. Arnold could see and hear people around him flailing and burning, screaming for God or Jesus — someone, anyone — to save them. I need to get out of here, he thought to himself. Immediately.

With his beige double-knit suit and parts of his body on fire, he squeezed through an opening in the broken fuselage and jumped out, tumbling to the ground.

Everything hurt. His head, his hands, his legs — all of them looked and felt like they had been seared on a blazing hot grill.

His right shoe having come off in the crash, Arnold ran away from the heat wearing only the one on his left foot. He could still hear people screaming inside the flaming plane behind him, but was sure that at any moment it would explode.

As he got clear of the wreckage, he encountered Hendrix — who had been separated from Schulze — wearing now-bloodied Navy whites.

“We’ve gotta get out of here,” Arnold said to him, and then Hendrix collapsed. Fueled by adrenaline, Arnold picked up the fallen man and held him across his chest as he continued making a beeline away from the heat.

A window that looked like a halo

Reeves, the 48-year-old veteran captain, had been killed on impact, as the cockpit smashed into that succession of trees. Daniels — the 36-year-old co-pilot who had been at the controls when Flight 212 crashed — was alive, but badly hurt.

Smoke filled the air, and snarling flames were threatening to consume the entire plane. The heat was unbearable.

And with the cockpit door locked from the inside, Daniels would need help to get out.

By some miracle, 26-year-old Colette Watson — the lead flight attendant, who’d been in the jump seat outside the cockpit — was hardly hurt at all. After the plane came to its final resting place, she enlisted the help of 46-year-old passenger Frank Mihalek, the only person in first class she could see who was upright.

Mihalek, a general manager for a manufacturing company, had been headed to a tool show in Chicago. In the last few seconds before the crash, he had braced himself against the bulkhead, breaking his shoulder in the process. He was badly burned but coherent.

He was amazed at the unblemished appearance of Watson. It doesn’t even look like she was on the plane when it crashed, he thought.

“Sir, let’s get this door open,” Watson said to Mihalek, and together they started trying to break into the cockpit. But plane hijacking was a major problem in 1974, so all of the cockpit doors in Eastern’s fleet of DC-9s had been equipped with anti-hijacking locks — and while thousands of parts on the plane either had broken or were on fire, the hijack lock held firm.

As the two wrestled with the door, they heard a voice on the other side that Watson recognized. It was the co-captain, Daniels.

“Jim, we can’t get this door open!” Watson yelled.

The dazed first officer, who had broken a leg and sustained several other injuries, managed to reach back and flip the anti-hijacking lock. Watson threw open the cockpit door, where she and Mihalek saw Reeves’ lifeless body on the left and Daniels on the right.

Watson then observed the circular window next to Reeves was wide open, and that it was big enough for a person to squeeze through. That window, Watson thought, looks just like a halo — something divine in the midst of the mayhem.

Mihalek and Watson managed to maneuver around Reeves’ body and climb out the window, only to realize Daniels was too injured to follow them. Mihalek quickly climbed back into the cockpit — which was smoldering — and helped Daniels crawl through the window, too. He and Watson both helped the co-pilot onto the ground.

“Get the people off the plane!” Daniels shouted.

Watson knew there was little else they could do for those inside. “The plane is in flames, Jim,” she countered.

Then Daniels seemed to wilt. “I need a cigarette,” he croaked.

Watson then began to try to help anyone who had been able to escape the cabin alive, and found a 17-year-old girl who was stumbling around in shock. The girl had been so badly burned that most of her clothes had gone up in smoke. Her hair was singed to the roots.

“Let me help you,” Watson said, trying to gently corral the girl.

Another surviving passenger offered his coat, and Watson persuaded the girl to lie down on it.

“I want my mama,” the girl said.

“I’m getting her as fast as I can,” Watson replied, softly.

Then, at the girl’s request — while several smaller explosions rocked the plane — the two recited the Lord’s Prayer together.

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name

Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done

On Earth as it is in heaven.

Picking up the crash phone

In the flight tower at Douglas Municipal Airport on Sept. 11, 1974, the air-traffic controllers had been having a normal morning.

It was somewhat foggy in Charlotte, but not so much that flights needed to be grounded. Five planes had already landed on Runway 36. Eastern Flight 212 was next in line.

Pete Hogan, a veteran air-traffic controller who had honed his craft during the Vietnam War, was supervising a younger controller as they watched the blips on the radar and communicated with the pilots.

Hogan was looking out the tower window — as he did constantly during his shift, searching for visual verification of what he was seeing on the radar — when he suddenly caught sight of a huge plume of smoke. It was rising over the fog bank, near where Flight 212 was supposed to be.

I sure hope that plane didn’t crash, Hogan thought.

Hogan looked back at the radar to discover that Flight 212 was no longer putting out a signal.

The controllers then called the pilots. No answer. Hogan got a sick feeling.

He picked up what controllers called the “crash phone,” which connected directly to the airport’s on-site fire department, and told the person who answered that he thought a DC-9 had crashed on its final approach.

“Where?” the man asked.

“Turn to your left,” Hogan said, “and follow the smoke.”

Bill Keathley, a 27-year-old firefighter who would become one of the very first responders, had heard the explosion from three miles away while coming up the stairs to go on duty at the airport fire station. He grabbed his gear and leaped onto a departing fire truck.

It raced to the scene, turning off of Highway 49 to tear down a resident’s driveway and into the woods — and as it approached the plane’s scattered wreckage, Keathley saw the enormous fires surrounding it.

We’ll be looking for bodies, not survivors, he thought to himself as he surveyed the scene.

You can’t live through nothin’ like that.

Yet to his amazement, he would quickly discover a few signs of life.

Arriving on the scene, Keathley spotted a man who was badly burned but still moving around, and raced up to him.

“Am I bleeding?” the man asked him.

“No,” Keathley said. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” the man replied. “Go help somebody else.”

That man would turn out to be Bill Shelley, 46, the chief pathologist at Charlotte Memorial Hospital.

He would battle grievous injuries — but died 29 days later, becoming the 72nd and final victim of Flight 212.

Eastern Airlines Flight 212 had 82 people on board on Sept. 11, 1974, when it crashed in Charlotte. Of those 82, 72 people died and 10 survived. This seat map illustrates where those 10 survivors were seated. It is approximate and based on Charlotte Observer research and interviews.

Survived Deceased Vacant

The survivors of Flight 212 included co-pilot Jim Daniels, who was seated on the right of the cockpit; flight attendant Colette Watson, seated in a jumpseat behind Daniels facing the first-class seats; and passenger Frank Mihalek, in seat 1B. Pilot James Reeves, on the left side of cockpit, was one of the 72 people who died.

Richard Arnold, who was seated in 5E, was one of the few passengers in the front of the plane who survived. He suffered severe burns. Looking out the window just before the crash, he could see the faces of people on the ground looking up at him. After the crash, he squeezed through an opening in the broken fuselage.

Additional survivors of Flight 212 included Bob Burnham in seat 15E, Charles Weaver in 16C, Roy Hendrix in 17C, Jim Schulze in 17D and John Toohey in 17E. All were seated in the smoking section. Hendrix would later say he was one of the few people in the world who could say “smoking saved my life.”

Scott Johnson, who boarded late and was seated in 20E, was in the final row of passenger seats and survived. However, flight attendant Eugenia Kerth, seated behind him in a jump seat, perished in the crash. The DC-9 plane was traveling close to 200 mph at impact and crash-landed 3.3 miles short of its intended runway.

Eastern Flight 212 remains the deadliest disaster in Charlotte aviation history. The 50th anniversary of the crash is Sept. 11, 2024. Of the 10 survivors of the crash, three remain alive today. The Charlotte Observer talked to all three, as well as family members of the other seven survivors, while researching this story and chart.

Hiding under a stretcher

In 1974, The Charlotte Observer paid an employee to listen to the police scanner overnight and call an editor if anything out of the ordinary happened. If it was deemed to be big enough news, that editor, in turn, would call a reporter on duty. The system wasn’t used often.

Recalled Mark Ethridge, the on-call reporter that morning: “There weren’t many of us who didn’t have beats and were just kind of on standby, as we used to say: ‘in case the plane crashed.’”

Ethridge rushed to the site in his beat-up yellow Volvo. The location wasn’t hard to find, because of the stream of ambulances, police cars, fire trucks and curious onlookers also converging on the area. But since much of the area was blocked off, he couldn’t get in as close as he’d have liked to at first.

So Ethridge walked up to a row of ambulances waiting to be cleared to enter, found one from Gaston County, and explained he was a reporter for the local newspaper.

“I’ve gotta get in there,” exclaimed Ethridge, exaggerating: “I’m gonna get fired if I don’t!”

The first responders took pity on him.

“Hop in and hide under the stretcher,” one said.

From his hiding place, he could feel the ambulance bumping its way over uneven terrain. Once on the scene, as he climbed out of the ambulance and looked around, Ethridge was overpowered by the smell of jet fuel.

Death seemed to be everywhere.

There were shapes hastily covered with sheets that, he knew, could only be dead bodies. There were fires all around, high in the trees and smoldering on the ground. And in spots where there was nothing left to burn, ash was piled high — but the reporter didn’t want to think about what that ash contained.

There were indicators of the lives the passengers had been toting along with them in the form of scattered belongings. And Ethridge did notice a striking bit of beauty: morning glories blooming in the cornfield, purple flowers that the fire hadn’t touched.

But otherwise, he said, “It was Dante’s Inferno.”

The brink of life and death

John McDowell, the farmer who owned the land the plane had skidded across, had been reading the newspaper in his kitchen when he heard what he thought was an explosion. He rushed outside, saw smoke off to the northwest, and jumped on his tractor.

As he headed toward the menacing plume, he came upon one very badly burned man trying to carry another very badly burned man away from it. “What happened??” McDowell shouted down at them.

“There’s been a plane crash,” Richard Arnold rasped.

“Oh my God!” McDowell said, as he jumped off to help. He and Arnold loaded Roy Hendrix onto the bush hog — the big mower hitched to the back of his tractor — then Arnold climbed on, too. McDowell got back into the driver’s seat of the tractor and towed the pair out to the area where ambulances and police cruisers were arriving en masse.

Lives teetered on the brink of death everywhere as those first responders — many wearing rubber surgical gloves and gauze masks to try to mute the smell of burned flesh — poured in.

All were aghast at what they were seeing. Bits of the plane and pieces of luggage were caught in the pines. A body also was stuck in the trees, but it came loose and plummeted to the ground as rescuers scoured the area.

Gerald Burgess, a 20-year-old Charlotte native who had joined the Woodlawn volunteer fire department just a month before, was particularly shaken. By the body parts, by the mangled wreckage, by the unidentifiable things that could be… well, he didn’t want to think about what they could be. It was too much.

“Guys, y’all can kick me out if you want to,” Burgess told his cohorts. “I can’t take this.” He hopped off the truck and headed back to where the ambulances were, opting to help provide food and water to the other first responders instead.

One of those, Charlotte firefighter Randy Bradshaw, had been in the first ambulance to arrive — but while running toward the victims he stepped in a hole and tore a ligament in his knee.

He ended up limping right back in the same ambulance, which would also carry survivors Schulze (the passenger who had been traveling with his Navy pal Roy Hendrix) and Daniels (the co-pilot) to what was then known as Charlotte Memorial Hospital.

Bradshaw has vivid memories of that ride. “Schulze’s shirt looked like he had just gotten it out of the cleaners,” he said. “It was that clean. But he didn’t have any shoes on at all, and I don’t believe he had any pants on. He never made a sound all the way to the hospital. None of them guys did. No moaning, no groaning, no nothing.

“I think they were in shock from the whole deal.”

What everyone was wondering

Aside from Shelley, the Memorial Hospital physician, there was only one other person from Charlotte on the plane: UNC Charlotte professor Walt Norem, who had been doing some consulting work in Charleston. The two men in fact knew one another a little bit and sat together on the plane. But whereas Shelley survived for a month, the 36-year-old Norem died on impact, leaving behind a wife and three young children.

Also notable among the dead was John Merriman, 50, news editor on the “CBS Evening News” with Walter Cronkite.

Meanwhile, nearly half of the victims were from Charleston, and several were of local prominence there — including Charles Cummings, a Navy rear admiral; Charleston TV anchor Wayne Seal; and Dr. James Colbert, vice president for academic affairs at Medical University of South Carolina.

Colbert died alongside the two teenage sons he was taking to boarding school, and would leave behind his wife Lorna and nine other children. The youngest, Stephen, was 10 years old at the time, and would grow up to become a nationally known comedian and CBS late-night talk show host.

The middle portion of the plane was particularly deadly, and many passengers died so swiftly they were later found still buckled into their seats. But according to a later National Transportation Safety Board report, 40 of the 72 victims would end up dying of burns and smoke inhalation — more than were killed by the actual impact itself.

Two hours after the crash, once all 13 of the initial survivors had been taken away by ambulance, the National Guard began the morbid task of sorting and loading up the dead.

The Guard kept dozens of plastic body bags in storage for such a disastrous occasion, and it needed them. Many of the bodies were so badly burned they would have to be identified through dental records.

And as those Guard members worked alongside emergency workers and investigators to comb through the wreckage of the first crash of a commercial airliner at or near the Charlotte airport since it opened in 1936, everyone was left wondering:

What in the world had happened to Flight 212?

Coming Monday

Part 3 | The Aftermath: What led to this deadly disaster? It started with a casual conversation in the cockpit.

How we reported this story

The Charlotte Observer series “9/11/74,” detailing the plane crash of Eastern Flight 212 in Charlotte and its aftermath, was reported and written by Scott Fowler and Théoden Janes.

Current photographs are by visual journalist Jeff Siner, while historical photographs mostly come from former Charlotte Observer photographer Don Sturkey. Videos are by Siner and Diamond Vences. Gavin Off contributed research. Taylor Batten and The' Pham were the series editors. This series is based primarily on dozens of new interviews conducted by The Observer with all the remaining survivors and their families, families of victims, crash investigators, aviation experts and first responders.

A trove of recently discovered and previously unreported transcribed interviews with the plane crash survivors — conducted by the National Transportation Safety Board in 1974 only a few days after the incident — was also relied upon for verification. In those interviews, survivors recounted in detail what they were thinking during the crash and its aftermath.

Janes and Fowler also pored over thousands of documents related to the crash; found additional material through library visits, the 1977 book “Final Approach” and FOIA requests; and visited Charlotte’s Sullenberger Aviation Museum and the crash site.

On Wednesday, Sept. 18, The Charlotte Observer will host a free event from 7-9 p.m. at Charlotte’s Independent Picture House that will include a screening of “9/11/74,” The Observer’s 30-minute documentary about the crash of Eastern Flight 212. Following the screening, a panel discussion about the series will feature plane crash survivors, family members and reporters Scott Fowler and Théoden Janes. Tickets are free, but RSVPs are required. Details here.

Additional Credits

Sohail Al-Jamea | Graphics

Rachel Handley | Illustrations & Design

David Newcomb | Development & Design