Hughes Airwest Flight 706 was a regularly scheduled Hughes Airwest flight operated by a Douglas DC-9-31 that collided in midair with a U.S. Marine Corps F-4B Phantom II on June 6, 1971. Flight 706 was en route from Los Angeles, California, to Seattle, Washington, with stopovers in Salt Lake City, Utah; Boise, Idaho; Lewiston, Idaho; Pasco, Washington; and Yakima, Washington. The F-4B Phantom was flying from Naval Air Station Fallon, Reno, Nevada, to Marine Corps Air Station El Toro, Irvine, California. All 49 passengers and crew aboard the civilian airliner, as well as the F-4B pilot, died in the collision over the San Gabriel Mountains, near Duarte, California.
The collision was the first fatal crash of a commercial airliner in the United States since the September 9, 1969, collision of Allegheny Airlines Flight 853 with a Piper PA-28. The crash of Flight 706 prompted the US Armed Forces to agree both to cut down the number of military aircraft operating under visual flight rules in civilian air corridors, and to require military aircraft to obey civilian air traffic controllers.
Read more about Hughes Airwest Flight 706: Flight Histories, Collision, Investigation, Aftermath
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That past nightfall I dared not cast”
—Ted Hughes (b. 1930)
“In all her products, Nature only develops her simplest germs. One would say that it was no great stretch of invention to create birds. The hawk which now takes his flight over the top of the wood was at first, perchance, only a leaf which fluttered in its aisles. From rustling leaves she came in the course of ages to the loftier flight and clear carol of the bird.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)