TWA Flight 599

TWA Flight 599

Accident summary
Date	March 31, 1931
Type	Structural failure
Site	Bazaar Township, Chase County, Kansas, US
Passengers	6
Crew	2
Injuries	0
Fatalities	8 (all)
Survivors	0
Aircraft type	Fokker F.10
Operator	Transcontinental and Western Air
Tail number	NC999E
Flight origin	Kansas City, Missouri
Stopover	Wichita, Kansas
Destination	Los Angeles, California

Transcontinental and Western Air Flight 599 was a Fokker F.10 Trimotor en route from Kansas City, Missouri, to Los Angeles, California, on March 31, 1931. It crashed a few miles north west of Bazaar, Kansas; all eight on board died. One of those killed was Knute Rockne, the head football coach at the University of Notre Dame, who was on his way to Los Angeles for the film The Spirit of Notre Dame.

It is often claimed that Flight 599 went down in or shortly after a thunderstorm, but meteorological records show that there was no significant convective activity at the time. The accident was actually caused by the composition of the aircraft. Fokker Trimotors were manufactured out of wood laminate; in this instance, moisture had leaked into the interior of one wing over a period and had weakened the glue bonding the structural members (called struts or spars) that prevented the wing from fluttering in flight. One spar finally failed; the wing developed uncontrolled flutter and separated from the aircraft.

Although the accident is best known for the death of Rockne, the accident also caused numerous changes in the operations of both TWA and the Aeronautics Branch of the US Department of Commerce, forerunner of today's FAA. All US airlines operating at that time were forced to remove Fokker Trimotors from service. The expense of this compounded with the bad publicity associated with Rockne's death almost sank TWA.

The intense public interest in the cause of the accident forced the Department of Commerce to abandon its policy of keeping the results of aircraft accident investigations secret. Many references claim that the accident was also the impetus for the formation of the Civil Aeronautics Board, an independent investigative organization and the predecessor of the NTSB, but the CAB was not formed until 1940, after an accident involving US Senator Bronson M. Cutting underlined the department's conflicts of interest with respect to its associations with airlines and its provision and maintenance of navigational aids.

See also

• List of accidents and incidents on commercial airliners
• Air safety

External links

• Planecrashinfo.com's information sheet on Flight 599
• Kansas Photo Tour of the accident site, including the Flight 599 Memorial
• Centennial of Flight information on CAA investigation of Flight 599
• Reflections from the Dome, a good article about the crash