{"id":819,"date":"1940-09-08T20:08:39","date_gmt":"1940-09-08T20:08:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/?p=819"},"modified":"2016-11-14T02:00:27","modified_gmt":"2016-11-14T02:00:27","slug":"airplane-crackup-worst-crash-in-history-kills-senator-lundeen-life-magazine-1940","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/airplane-crackup-worst-crash-in-history-kills-senator-lundeen-life-magazine-1940\/","title":{"rendered":"Airplane Crackup, Worst Crash In History, Kills Senator Lundeen &#8211; LIFE Magazine (1940)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>LIFE Magazine, September 16, 1940:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;AIRPLANE CRACK-UP, WORST CRASH IN HISTORY, KILLS SENATOR LUNDEEN&#8221;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The news U.S. air-transport men have been dreading finally came in August 31, 1940. \u00a0That afternoon a Pennsylvania Central\u00a0Airlines DC-3 transport dived full speed into a field near Lovettsville, Virginia. \u00a0Its 22 passengers, two pilots and stewardess were all killed. \u00a0It was the first fatal airline accident in 17 months and the worst in all U.S. airline history.<\/p>\n<p>Pennsylvania Central flies between Norfolk, Virginia and Milwaukee. \u00a0It had never had a fatal crack-up in 13 years of operation. On August 31 [1940] the weather was stormy. \u00a0The doomed plane reported all well at 2:31 p.m., then headed into a squall. \u00a0At 2:41 it crashed at top speed into a field of alfalfa, ricocheted 50 yards into a cornfield. \u00a0There it disintegrated completely. \u00a0Its wings flew off. \u00a0Its cabin split like a dried pod. \u00a0Its engines burst from their\u00a0nacelles. \u00a0The bodies of a passenger and the stewardess were flung 1,500 feet from the crash.<\/p>\n<p>From what little was left of the plane it was hard to tell what had happened. \u00a0The pilot had his engines wide open. \u00a0The plane was in a 45 degree dive. \u00a0The Senate threatened an investigation, for on the plane was Ernest Linden of Minnesota, the second U.S. Senator to be killed in an airline crash within five years.<\/p>\n<p><em>(Many thanks to Judy Virts-Beard Fox, Lovettsville Historical Society Board member, for donating this copy of LIFE Magazine to the LHS Museum.)<\/em><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-771\" src=\"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/1940-09-16-LIFE-Magazine-for-Web-Facebook-1024x819.jpg\" alt=\"1940-09-16-life-magazine-for-web-facebook\" width=\"1024\" height=\"819\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/1940-09-16-LIFE-Magazine-for-Web-Facebook-1024x819.jpg 1024w, http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/1940-09-16-LIFE-Magazine-for-Web-Facebook-300x240.jpg 300w, http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/1940-09-16-LIFE-Magazine-for-Web-Facebook-768x614.jpg 768w, http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/1940-09-16-LIFE-Magazine-for-Web-Facebook.jpg 2000w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>LIFE Magazine, September 16, 1940: &#8220;AIRPLANE CRACK-UP, WORST CRASH IN HISTORY, KILLS SENATOR LUNDEEN&#8221; The news U.S. air-transport men have been dreading finally came in August 31, 1940. \u00a0That afternoon&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":771,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-newspaper"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=819"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":820,"href":"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819\/revisions\/820"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}