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New York • Fifty years ago, two commercial airliners collided one mile above New York City, raining down destruction on a busy Brooklyn neighborhood. Victims' remains bloodied the snow after one jet hit the street at 200 mph, killing everyone aboard and six people on the ground.
The Dec. 16, 1960, crash of a United jet and a TWA propeller plane was the worst aviation disaster to date, killing 134 people, including 128 people on both planes. In its wake it left a legacy of improved air safety; it was first crash in which investigators made extensive use of "black boxes" and it spurred a revamping of the air traffic control system to prevent future tragedies.
Photos of the crash show the broken United Airlines DC-8 resting on Seventh Avenue, the main commercial strip of Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood. At least 10 buildings were destroyed including a funeral home, a laundry and the Pillar of Fire Church. The dead included a garbage collector and two men selling Christmas trees.
Hopes were raised in Brooklyn when a young passenger was found alive, then dashed when he died.
"What was in many of our hearts was that God let him survive that horrible fall," said Eileen Bonner, a nursing supervisor at the hospital where 11-year-old Stephen Baltz was treated. "It just seemed like God wanted him to live. And then he didn't."
The other plane, a TWA Constellation, crashed into a military air base on Staten Island.
But it was Stephen Baltz who captured the nation's attention.
Stephen, from Wilmette, Ill., was found alive but badly burned in a snowbank and rushed to nearby Methodist Hospital.
But Stephen could not survive his injuries, including severe smoke inhalation. He died the next morning.
Stephen's parents have died, but his brother William Baltz and sister Randee Kadziel keep his memory alive.
Kadziel, who is 59 and a schoolteacher in Park City, Utah, said Stephen loved to play outdoors on a rope swing and build model airplanes.
She suffered for years after Stephen's death. "My mother was the strong one and would find me in the closet crying," she said.
If the 1960 crash has been erased from the physical landscape, its place in aviation history is secure.
The collision was the first air disaster in which flight recorders — the planes' so-called black boxes — provided extensive details for investigators.
Air traffic controllers had told the DC-8 to enter an oval-shaped holding pattern upon reaching a certain point — near New York. Instead the DC-8 flew 11 miles past the holding point, possibly because one of its navigational radios was not working, and crashed into the Constellation as the other airplane was lining up to land at LaGuardia.
After the crash, the Federal Aviation Agency — later renamed the Federal Aviation Administration — instituted new rules to prevent the recurrence of such a tragedy. The collision spurred the FAA to modernize the air traffic control system.
"It's a shame that disaster is what sparks progress, but that's what happens," said Marc S. Moller, a lawyer who has spent his career litigating plane crashes. "Disaster becomes the catalyst for improvements."