Walker County Airport - Air Resorts Airline Flight 953 Accident

Air Resorts Airline Flight 953 Accident

On December 16, 1984, Air Resorts Airlines Flight 953 experienced an in-flight engine failure, fire, and ground collision during the landing roll following an emergency landing at the airport. The flight was carrying the East Tennessee State University basketball team to Oxford, Mississippi from Birmingham, Alabama. Two of the 39 occupants of the Convair CV 440 airplane were seriously injured during the accident, 11 others received minor injuries. As the airport did not have on-field emergency services, the nearby Jasper Fire Department was called by the airport manager moments before the emergency landing after being alerted by the Birmingham Approach air traffic controller. During the landing the aircraft veered off Runway 27 and crossed the north-south taxiway, at which time the right landing gear separated and the airplane skidded to a stop. The aircraft was subsequently destroyed by fire. The NTSB concluded the accident resulted from the failure of the Number 6 cylinder in the right engine which caused a complete loss of power with a subsequent windmilling propeller and engine fire.

Read more about this topic:  Walker County Airport

Famous quotes containing the words air, airline, flight and/or accident:

    At length, having come up fifty rods off, he uttered one of those prolonged howls, as if calling on the god of loons to aid him, and immediately there came a wind from the east and rippled the surface, and filled the whole air with misty rain, and I was impressed as if it were the prayer of the loon answered, and his god was angry with me; and so I left him disappearing far away on the tumultuous surface.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    My job as a reservationist was very routine, computerized ... I had no free will. I was just part of that stupid computer.
    Beryl Simpson, U.S. employment counselor; former airline reservationist. As quoted in Working, book 2, by Studs Terkel (1973)

    Fear of error which everything recalls to me at every moment of the flight of my ideas, this mania for control, makes men prefer reason’s imagination to the imagination of the senses. And yet it is always the imagination alone which is at work.
    Louis Aragon (1897–1982)

    A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a weather-vane, a wind-mill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door; a moment,—and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again.
    Walter Pater (1839–1894)