A Day of Death and Destruction in 'Bird Cage'

Private Pilot Jim Campbell, flying at 1,500 ft. near Los Angeles, could not believe his eyes. Looking up, he saw a flash of light 1 1/2 miles off to the left of his aircraft. The fireball turned into a plume of black smoke, and Campbell watched in horror as a huge DC-9 airliner dropped its nose and rolled to its left. Twisting upside down, the wounded aircraft picked up speed as it plunged toward earth. "Oh!" shouted Campbell to himself. "Pull her up. Pull her up. Oh, pull her up!"

In the cockpit of Aeromexico Flight 498, Pilot Arturo Valdes Prom was helpless. Glistening behind him in the noonday sun were the falling remains of his plane's horizontal stabilizer, a part of the tail that is vital to maintaining control. Also fluttering to the ground was the fuselage of a single-engine Piper Cherokee Archer that had collided with the DC-9 on the virtually cloudless day. Trying to slow the dive of his 60-ton plane, Valdes threw its two engines into reverse thrust. The whine of the jets grew to an awful roar before the airliner smashed with a fiery explosion into a pleasant middle-class neighborhood of suburban Cerritos, where residents had been enjoying the Labor Day weekend.

All the Aeromexico airliner's 64 occupants perished. So did William Kramer, 53, a retired executive of Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical Corp., who was piloting the Piper; his wife Kathleen, 51; and daughter Caroline, 27. The tragedy was compounded by the devastation on the ground. The disintegrating jet slammed into the tidy houses below, igniting fires and spewing debris over several blocks. Sixteen houses were badly damaged, eight destroyed. The task of counting fatalities turned into a macabre chore as authorities tried to distinguish body parts of the air travelers from those of victims on the ground. The best estimate was that 15 neighborhood people had died, raising the death toll to 82.

 

 

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