The first snowflakes were flecking Edwin Walton’s windows when his barn roof flashed red in the night. Explosions that followed the first great fireball were still reverberating as the Waltons reached the wreck of Trans World Airlines Flight 128 close to their ranch house in Hebron, Ky. The four-jet Convair 880 bound from Los Angeles with 82 persons aboard was approaching the Greater Cincinnati Airport when it clipped saplings on the bluffs above the Ohio River, caromed over a ridge, sliced through tall timber, and then ploughed into an apple orchard half a mile away.
“We saw this man standing about 50 ft. from the plane,” Walton recalled. “He was leaning over a fence. He said, ‘My eyeballs are burned. I can’t see. Don’t leave me here.’ ” A second man asked repeatedly whether the airliner was taking off. Again and again, Walton told him it had been landing. “Oh, my wife,” the dazed survivor said at last. “Thank God she’s safe! I was going to meet her.”
Head Down. Hebron’s volunteer firemen were driven back by one explosion. “Through the wreckage and out of the smoke came this man carrying a small child,” said Fireman Paul Dickmann. “The man’s hair was all burned off, his face was burned, and there appeared to be flesh hanging down from his hand. ‘Get to someone who needs help,’ he said. Then he collapsed in my arms with the child.” A 15-month-old baby lived through the crash, as did Chris Haile, 5, and his little sister Eileen, 2, whose parents were killed; 15 adults survived the impact, but four later died.
Passenger George Brokaw is alive because he remembered instructions on a small card on the back of the next seat and tucked his head between his knees when he saw sparks from the Convair’s nose. “I thought we were coming in for a normal landing,” said Robert Cooley, who awoke 200 ft. from the debris. “I sure hate to land in Cincinnati,” remarked Stewardess Eleanor Kurtock, a survivor, seconds before the airliner took its final plunge—7,050 ft. short of the airport’s North-South Runway 18.
A Civil Aeronautics Board investigation so far gives no hint why the pilot, Captain Charles Cochran, 45, a veteran of 14,000 flying hours who died in the cockpit, was flying too low. Despite the snow, weather conditions did not rule out a visual landing; moreover, all pilots were warned that Cincinnati’s electronic glide slope indicator had been out of action since Sept. 5 while the runway is being lengthened. Airport officials hastened to give their facilities a clean bill. Nonetheless, twice before in the past six years the hills of Hebron have been a November graveyard for aircraft approaching Runway 18. A Boeing 727 crashed in rain little more than a mile from the orchard when the pilot miscalculated his approach during the evening of Nov. 8, 1965, killing 58 of the 62 persons aboard; on Nov. 14, 1961, two crewmen of a Zantop Airlines DC-4 freighter escaped before it exploded amid the apple trees.
The tragic coincidences prompted Ohio’s Governor James A. Rhodes to request closure of the runway. Rhodes claimed that pilots approaching Runway 18 are buffeted by downdrafts over the hills and that the rolling terrain causes a form of optical illusion. Though neither of these complaints figures in warnings to pilots using the field, the crash of Flight 128 will reinforce demands by Ohioans to move Cincinnati’s main airport away from Kentucky and into their own state.
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