Manchester and Boston are not very far apart, and just six minutes after takeoff, the pilots began preparing for their descent. He settled into a window seat in the very last row, unaware of the critical role his choice would play in the events that followed. Before he left, he and his fiancée had privately agreed to marry. One of the passengers who stayed on board was Leopold Chouinard, a 20-year-old Air Force sergeant who was returning to Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska after 30 days on leave with his family in Vermont. It would prove to be the best decision Mealy ever made. During taxi to the runway he asked to be let off, and the pilots returned to the parking area so he could disembark. There had been 84 passengers, but businessman Charles Mealy concluded that due to the delay caused by the stopover in Manchester, he could get to his meeting in Boston faster by car. (Google + Own work)īy the time flight 723 departed its stopover in Manchester at 10:50 a.m., there were 83 passengers and six crew on board, including the three pilots and three flight attendants. Route of Delta flight 723, with an unscheduled stopover. Flight 723 would be asked to add a stopover to its already short journey in order to pick them up. But before the flight could leave Burlington, the airline provided the crew with some unwelcome news: a stopover would be added in Manchester, New Hampshire, where a number of Delta passengers had been stranded after weather conditions caused the cancellation of their flight to Boston. The flight to Boston from sparsely populated Vermont was not supposed to be heavily booked. On the 31st of July 1973 they were to fly Delta flight 723 from Burlington to Boston, along with a cockpit observer: another former Northeast pilot, 52-year-old Joseph Burrell, who had been on leave for six years due to mild Parkinson’s disease, and was now familiarizing himself with company procedures in preparation for his re-certification.
By July 1973, Delta had just finished overhauling the cockpit instruments and radio systems on the DC-9s it acquired from Northeast to bring them into line with the rest of the fleet, and former Northeast pilots had recently undergone training on the changes.Īmong those pilots were Captain John Streil, 49, an experienced pilot with over 14,800 hours and First Officer Sidney Burrill, who had 7,000 total hours but was quite new to the DC-9. Among these acquisitions was a regular service between Burlington, Vermont and Boston, Massachusetts, which today would be operated with a small turboprop, but in 1972 used a jet: the Douglas DC-9, a workhorse of short-haul routes across the United States. In 1972, Delta Air Lines merged with the struggling regional carrier Northeast Airlines, in the process acquiring a large number of routes, planes, and pilots. N975NE, the aircraft involved in the accident. The tragedy exposed flaws in cockpit technology, pilot procedures, and air traffic control services - but also highlighted some of the ways in which the aviation industry in the 1970s was reluctant to grapple with the causes of human error. It was also a story of a rescue gone awry, with the burning plane sitting on the runway threshold for nine minutes while the controller, blissfully unaware of the disaster, kept clearing more planes to land.
#PICKTORIAL CRASH LOOP SERIES#
That story began with an approach that was dangerously rushed, an unseasonable mid-summer fog, an incorrect mode setting, and a series of small coincidences and errors that put the DC-9 on a collision course with the seawall. The lone survivor was Leopold Chouinard, who clung to life despite severe injuries, becoming a Bostonian folk hero in the process - but, tragically, he died in hospital four months after the crash, leaving no one left alive who could tell the story of Delta flight 723. On the 31st of July 1973, a Delta Air Lines DC-9 on approach to Boston, Massachusetts slammed into a seawall at the foot of the runway, spewing burning wreckage across the airport and killing 88 of the 89 people on board. An investigator examines the wreckage of Delta flight 723, as a Boeing 747 and a Boeing 707 taxi across the airport in the background.