Airliner hits suburb

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33096, 11 December 1972, Page 17

Airliner hits suburb

' N Z.P.A.-Keuter—Copyright) CHICAGO, December 9.

A Boeing 737 was making a second landing approach after giving way to a private twin-engined plane when it plunged into a Chicago suburb, killing 45 persons.

A member of the National Transportation Safety Board, Mr William Haley, said that the airport tower gave the private plane priority and told the airliner to “go round again.” I Eighteen survivors)

j But apparently it went to 'the right of the centre line i approach to the runway at | Chicago’s Midway airport, he said. Mr Lamb said the wreckage showed that the entire centre of the the fuselage had been enveloped in flames, leaving only a rear galley door through which the surviving passengers and crew could escape. The crash was the first of the Boeing 737, a short-range twin-jet passenger plane much used on domestic routes in the United States and abroad. Mr Haley said that the cockpit voice recorder and the flight record instruments had been retrieved from the wreckage and would be analysed.

have been accounted forj out of the 61 people' aboard the airliner when \ it ploughed into the, street and erupted in aj ball of flame.

Two other bodies found in the wreckage are believed to be those of residents of. the houses destroyed in the crash.

The chief investigator, Mr William Lamb, said that missed approaches were not uncommon.

The airport tower’s instruction to go round again was “a normal procedure that happens with considerable frequency.” The safety board spokesman said that the airliner was ordered to turn left after ■ entering a 3.3 mile zone [around the airport, in which i aircraft are subject to tower (control.