The Boeing 247 Crash of 1933

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The Boeing 247

Public domain

1933 United Airlines Boeing 247 Mid-Air Explosion

In October 1933, a United Airlines Boeing 247 was blown out of the sky over Indiana. There were seven people aboard the flight, and they all perished in what turned out to be the first-ever case of aeronautical terrorism.

Flight 23

The United Airlines flight 23 left Newark, New Jersey, in the late afternoon of October 10, 1933; it was the start of a hop-scotch journey to Oakland, California. The plane had stopped at Cleveland and was headed on the next leg of its route to Chicago when disaster struck.

The plane was a Boeing 247, often described as the first purpose-built passenger aircraft. It went into service in February 1933. It had a top speed of 200 mph and a maximum range of 745 miles. The airliner could carry 10 passengers in air-conditioned comfort. On the night of the disaster, flight 23 had four passengers and a crew of three.

The Crash Site

Just before 9 p.m., witnesses on the ground near Chesterton, northern Indiana, heard a loud explosion. They saw a plane plummeting from the sky in flames, and there was another explosion when it hit the ground.

The plane was about 1,000 feet up when the explosion happened, so the debris field was not huge. Flight 23 came to rest in a wooded area close to a gravel road, the mangled fuselage was in one place, but the tail section had been blown off and crashed elsewhere.

Within a couple of hours, United Airlines staff from Chicago had reached the site to find that state police had found and removed five bodies. The two other passengers had fallen out of the broken rear section of the plane and were found near the tail section.

The People on Flight 23

• The chief pilot was Harold R. Tarrant, 25. He had been with United for about two years and was considered something of a veteran in a fledgling industry.
• The co-pilot was 28-year-old A.T. Ruby, who had complained to his brother about being pressured to join the pilot’s union.
• The flight attendant, or stewardess as they called in those days, was Alice Scribner, 26. At the time, stewardesses were required to be trained nurses, be no taller than five feet, two inches, and weigh less than 123 pounds. Ms. Scribner had only recently joined the airline.
• Passenger Frederick Schendorf, 28, was the manager of R. Cooper, Jr., Inc., Chicago, a company that made refrigerators.
• H.R. (Warren) Burris was an employee of United and worked on radios.
• Forty-four-year-old Emil Smith of Chicago was returning home after watching a couple of World Series baseball games in New York.
• Finally, there was Dorothy M. Dwyer, 25, from Arlington, Massachusetts. She was flying to Reno, Nevada, to marry her fiancé. She was booked on an earlier flight that she missed because of a flat tire on the way to the airport.