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Looking Back 1962

Jan 8, 2010 | James Rada Jr. | Cumberland Times-News

In 1962, the first year the National Transportation Safety Board began recording aircraft accidents, 331 people died in the United States in 64 incidents. In July, a flight to Honolulu crashed, killing 127 passengers. In May, dynamite hidden in flight exploded a plane over Iowa, killing 45 passengers.

Even if the flights weren't fatal, they could be scary. In August, a jet with 81 passengers landed in a field in Iowa instead of at an airport "by mistake."

The Cumberland Municipal Airport escaped most of the accidents of this nature. Never a major passenger airport, the airport catered to smaller aircraft and lighter aircraft.

So it wasn't surprising that one clear Saturday night in 1962, Airport Manager John Nash called in 17-year-old James Abe of Wiley Ford to hold down the fort at the airport. Nash had somewhere he needed to be so he had to leave early. Abe had been working at the airport part time for about a year. All he was expected to do was be at the airport and turn on the runway lights if anybody came in.

And that's all he did, but in doing so, he helped keep those 331 fatalities in 1962 from climbing over 400.

Around 10:30 p.m., Abe took a call from Martinsburg Flight Service. He was told a TWA Martin 404 passenger flight on its way to Washington, D.C. was going to make an emergency landing at the airport.

"Make sure the lights are on," the caller told Abe. "He's got an engine out and he's going to land."

Abe quickly turned on the runway lights. He also called the Cumberland police and fire departments. Then he went outside to sit on a bench and wait for the plane to land. Before long, he could see the plane coming in from the east.

The Martin 404 first came into service in 1950. The planes were about 75 feet long and 93 feet wide from wing tip to wing tip. They could travel at 225 mph, but this plane was only flying on one engine.

The plane intended to land on runway 24, which was just over a mile long.

However, Abe quickly saw a problem as the plane drew closer. He remembers thinking, "Oh, my God, he's too high. He's never going to get it down and get it stopped."

In their book "Wings Over Cumberland: An Aviation History," Bob Poling and Bill Armstrong wrote, "In any emergency of this kind, and especially at night on an unfamiliar airport with a twin-engine airplane, pilots often add five or more knots air speed to their approach air speed as a safety factor against unexpected obstacles. However, the Martin 404 was known as an aircraft that, with excessive air speed, would float quite a bit upon round out for landing."

The plane had passed over more than half the runway before it finally touched down.

Abe was scared because he knew if the plane couldn't stop in time, there was a 100-foot drop at the end of the runway and below that were houses. It looked like a disaster in the making.

"I thought, 'This is going to be awful. I don't want to see it,' " Abe said.

He started to go for help when he heard the reverse thrusters screeching. The plane quickly slowed down. When it finally stopped at the end of the runway, the nose gear sat in the grass.

As the plane taxied to the administration building, Abe felt a great weight lift off his shoulders.

"People started getting off the airplane," Abe said. "They did not know where the hell they were. The stewardesses tried to answer their questions and calm them down. Then they just started passing out the miniatures. That calmed them down a bit."

Poling and Armstrong write that the air crew of the TWA flight got its first look at Wiley Ford and the mountain beyond the runway the plane had landed on the next morning.

"In the daylight hours, the TWA pilots realized how lucky they were and had second thoughts about their high air speed during their emergency approach into Cumberland," Poling and Armstrong wrote.

Runway 6/24 has since been replaced by runway 5/23. It has clearer approaches, though it is a shorter runway, according to Poling and Armstrong.