Two air collisions

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33739, 11 January 1975, Page 14

Two air collisions

(N.Z. Press Assn— Copyright) WHITTIER (California), January 10.

Fourteen people were killed yesterday when a commuter airliner and a light plane collided, raining debris and bodies on a schoolyard where pupils were watching a basketball game.

No-one on the ground was reported injured. Authorities said all 12 people in the commuter plane and both those in the smaller craft were killed.

“It just seemed like they went right into each other,” said an eyewitness. “Then they just exploded, and there were pieces flying everywhere.” Bodies spilled from a hole in the airliner’s side, another witness said. The Golden West Airlines twin-engine commuter plane was on a 60-mile hop from suburban Ontario, California, to Los Angeles Airport with 10 passengers and two crew members, airline officials said.

The light plane was a i single-engine Cessna 150 ifrom nearby Long Beach Airiport carrying a pilot and a student pilot who had taken off minutes before the collision.

In Newport News, Virginia, today, a United States Air Force T-29 trainer plane carrying nine people and a small private plane collided over the James River, and no survivors have been reported. One body was recovered from the river, but the others were missing, a. Coast Guard spokesman said. 4 The small plane, again a Cessna 150, was piloted by a Navy enlisted man stationed aboard the landing ship Pensacola at Little Creek naval base in Norfolk, Virginia. The T-29, a twin-engine craft from Langley Air Force Base, was en route from Key Field in Meridian, Mississippi, to Langley,