Maddux Air Lines - Accidents

Accidents

On April 21, 1929 a Maddux Air Lines Ford 5-AT-B Tri-motor was involved in a midair collision with a single-engine U.S. Army Boeing B-PW-9D pursuit biplane near San Diego. Shortly after taking off from San Diego, the airliner was flying at around 2,000 feet on its way to Imperial Valley, California, when the pilot of the biplane buzzed the airliner and, misjudging its speed, collided with it. The army pilot, Lieutenant Howard W. Keefer, tried to bail out of the wreckage, but his parachute got entangled, and both aircraft crashed near the Lexington Park subdivision of eastern San Diego on the side of a canyon. All five people aboard the Tri-Motor and the Army pilot, who was found “criminally negligent” for approaching the airliner, died in the crash. This was the first midair collision involving a U.S. airliner.

On January 19, 1930 TAT-Maddux Flight Number 7, a Ford 5-AT-C Tri-Motor crashed north of Oceanside, California. Flying from the races at Agua Caliente, near Tijuana, Mexico to Los Angeles, the plane encountered rain, low clouds, fog, and possibly engine problems. The pilots were attempting to turn around and/or land when they misjudged the aircraft’s height off the ground and the left wing struck the ground, slamming the aircraft into the ground, which subsequently caught fire. Both pilots and all 14 passengers aboard were killed in the crash. Charles Lindbergh, as chairman of TAT-Maddux’s technical committee, was involved in the investigation and made an aerial inspection of the crash site after the disaster.