The Cal-Poly crash gets lost amidst the scope of
the Marshall tragedy which occurred in Huntington in November 1970. However, a decade before the Marshall
tragedy, another college football team was in plane crash. Sixteen players, the
student manager, and a team booster died in the crash.
The New York Times reported the crash as the first known crash in
the US involving a sporting team. It was the first major crash involving any
sports team in the world since the 1958 crash of a British European Airways
flight in Munich that killed 23, including eight members of the Manchester
United football (soccer) club. The
consequence of the crash was a tremendous debate about air safety in the United
States and a fundamental change in takeoff procedures to ensure that such an
event would not happen again under the same circumstances.
The plane was owned by
Arctic-Pacific out of Oakland, California. The pilot was Captain Bob Flemming with
co-pilot captain Don Chescher. The
charter flight crashed at the western edge of the airport at 11:25 PM.
Subsequent investigation revealed a variety of
unnecessary risk factors. Fog had closed
the airport four hours before the accident.
The control tower only had authority to deny landings, but could not
stop any craft from taking off. The Lucas county sheriff’s office reported that
the airport control tower called at 11:10 PM to report an airplane takeoff, and
then called again at 11:15 to report a fiery crash. It took emergency responders 20 minutes to
get to the airport from Toledo. The fog was so thick that there were
no witnesses to the crash. It was only
heard.
Assistant coach Shel Hardin observed that the tail
on the C-46 “just seemed to drop and the plane fell off to the left.” Head coach Leroy Hughes said “the left motor
conked out. Then it [the plane] spun over.” James Fahey, a halfback, “We barely
got off when the engines started sputtering . . . then the left engine gave
out---thump! I ducked my head and saw flames shooting. The bottom went over the
top, it flipped over.”
This crash led to swift governmental action. It turned out that on October 24 the Civil
Areonautics Board had ordered the fleet of C-46s be inspected to determine if
wing bolts needed to be replaced. That
order arose not from the Toledo crash, but was already in place at the time of
the crash in response to an earlier crash on October 15 in Utah. On October 31
1960 the FAA suspended the operating license of carrier Arctic-Pacific for
“gross disregard for public safety and the regulations of the Federal Aviation
Agency,” according to then-agency director E. R. Quesada.
On
November 14, 1960, the FAA determined that the Toledo crash was a product of
overloading a craft that was “not in an air-worthy condition.”
On November 11, US senator Mike Monroney (D-Okla.)
announced that his aviation subcommittee would hold hearings in January 1961 in
response to the Toledo tragedy. Specifically, he advocated for more tower
control and stiffer penalties for disregarding tower directives. “The control
tower operator did not have firm authority to hold the plane on the
ground. Under such circumstances [zero
visibility] it might be best to give the control tower operator the right to
override the pilot . . . . stiffer regulations might prevent many light plane
crashes. Pilots would take fewer chances if they faced loss of their licenses
for failing to take orders from the tower.”
On Thanksgiving Day, November 23, , LA
County Supervisor Warren Dorn and Bob Hope provided a Mercy Bowl in the Los
Angeles Memorial Coliseum between Fresno
State and Bowling Green State to raise a memorial fund for the survivors and
bereaved families. The event raised about $200,000. As of 2006, memorial
plaques for the crash can be found on campus at Mott Gym and the Mustang horse
statue. A permanent memorial plaza opened with the new Alex G. Spanos Stadium.
The memorial has 18 copper pillars, one for each of the team members who died
in the crash. Each copper pillar rises to the height of the player honored, and
is adorned with a plaque about that player's life.
At
the time of the crash, Bowling Green State had been the easternmost opposing
school ever to play football against Cal Poly.It would be nine years before Cal
Poly would play outside California and eighteen years before the school would
send a team over the Rockies to play.
A survivor of the crash, Ted Tollner, went on to be
head coach at San Diego State and USC. Former
NFL coach and sportscaster John Madden, an alumnus of Cal Poly (’58) knew many
of the victims of the crash. He prefers
to travel by bus since the crash.
About the
C-46: The C-46 Commando was a
passenger plane developed by the Curtiss corporation. Designed for airline use in 1940, it
initially served as a military transport.
After World War II, most of the 3,000-plus C-46s ended up in cargo
service as passenger carriers preferred the DC-3 and the C-47. Some are still in cargo service in remote
parts of the globe. Since 1964 the NTSB
has investigated 84 crashes involving C-46s, including a dozen fatal crashes.
