Episode 36: The Crash of Delta Flight 723
On July 31st, 1973, Delta airlines flight 723 departed from Burlington, VT and was headed for Logan Airport in Boston, Massachusetts after an unscheduled stopover in Manchester, NH. 83 passengers and 6 crew members were on board, including experienced 49-year-old Captain John Streil, 31-year-old First Officer Burrill, and 52-year-old Joseph Burrell who was there to observe and train after a leave of absence.
This flight was initially not going to be crowded, but due to other cancellations as a result of bad weather, flight 723 acquired 45 additional passengers. Just six minutes after takeoff the pilots began preparing for landing, and this is where things began to go awry.
Air traffic control began giving the pilots instructions so that they could line up with the instrumental landing system (ILS), a series of radio beams that assists with landing smoothly and securely on the runway. The first of many issues was that the plane was traveling much too fast to make a series of turns that air traffic control instructed them to make. When the plane was able to connect with part of the landing system and asked for permission to land, air traffic control became unresponsive as they were dealing with another plane. This delay led to flight 723 overshooting the angle that they needed to land, and when they tried to correct this by adjusting their controls, the pilot made a grave error.
This error with the controls, where the pilot accidentally changed the flying mode of the plane into a setting that is not compatible with landing, went unnoticed as the pilots were then cleared to land. On their descent it was not communicated to them just how bad the weather really was. A thick wave of fog had rolled in, making the pilots unable to see that they had broken through the clouds and were far past the point of abandoning their landing. Air traffic control had no visibility of the plane when it flew full force into a 16 foot sea wall at the end of the runway, killing 87 of the 89 people on board on impact. The plane was almost entirely disintegrated, and the runway was littered with flaming debris and bodies still strapped to their seats.
Construction workers nearby heard the crash and alerted the fire department, who arrived nine minutes after the crash and this is when air traffic control finally realized what had happened. Of the two survivors, one died two hours later in the hospital. The other, 20-year-old Air Force Sergeant Leopold Chouinard, endured burns on 85% of his body and was in critical condition. He survived for 133 days after the crash before dying of pneumonia as a complication of his condition on December 11th, 1973. He is regarded as a hero in Boston history to this day.
This crash remains the worst airline disaster in New England history, and was a result of both human error and system failure.
Image sources:
medium.com - “The crash of Delta flight 723”