A shadow falls over the night before Christmas this year.
This Christmas Eve marks the 40th anniversary of the first of
two Allegheny Airlines crashes in the area within two weeks of each
other, considered among Bradford’s greatest tragedies.
The first crash took place Dec. 24, 1968, and resulted in the
deaths of 20 of the 45 people onboard Flight 736, which flew out of
Detroit with scheduled stops in Erie, Bradford, Harrisburg and
Washington, D.C. The plane went down in Mount Alton, 3.5 miles out
from the Bradford Regional Airport.
The Christmas Eve crash was closely followed by a second crash
on Jan. 6, 1969, also an Allegheny Airlines plane.
Both aircraft were Convair 580s.
The second flight, Flight 737, was the westbound sister flight,
leaving from Washington, D.C., and headed to Detroit with stops in
Harrisburg, Bradford and Erie. That flight crashed on the fairway
at Pine Acres Country Club, killing 11 of the 28 people on
board.
According to survivors’ accounts from the Flight 736 crash, the
pilot was unaware of how close to the ground the plane was until
the plane’s belly clipped a tree. That was quickly followed by the
right wing connecting with another tree and shearing off. The plane
plowed through the snow on the ground and came to rest upside down,
more than 1,000 feet from the tree it first hit.
The 20 people killed included pilot Gary Lee Mull, a four-year
airline employee, first officer Richard Bruce Gardner, an employee
with the airline for one and a half years, and all but two of the
passengers seated in the first four rows of the plane. No one
scheduled to disembark at Bradford was killed.
The survivors were seated in the last nine rows and were belted
into their seats, upside down when the plane came to rest.
The Flight 737 crash also killed the pilot, Captain William B.
Blanton, and first officer Ronald Leslak. Five passengers with
Bradford as their destination were among those killed, including
three students at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford.
The Christmas Eve crash was later attributed to limited
visibility due to the darkness and blowing snow. As a result of
this accident, officials from the National Transportation Safety
Board advised the installation of an Instrument Landing System
(ILS) at any airport with sufficient traffic to qualify for one and
for installation of Approach Light Systems at any airport where a
full ILS would not be feasible.
An ILS was installed at Bradford Regional 11 months after the
crash of Flight 736.
Prior to the two crashes, Allegheny Airlines, which began in
1939 as All-American Aviation Co., flew 15 million passengers to
their destinations and traveled three billion miles without a
serious accident.
