April 24

The Cold War rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union claimed another victim 41 years ago today, when cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov plummeted 150 miles to Earth aboard the Soyuz I spacecraft. The accident took place three months after the United States lost three astronauts in the Apollo 1 fire; it set the Soviet space program back by nearly two years, helping to assure that the United States would be the first superpower to reach the Moon.

Described posthumously by the Communist Party as “a loyal son of our motherland and a courageous explorer of space,” Komarov was incinerated when the ship struck the ground near Orenburg, Siberia after both its main and reserve parachutes failed, with the latter becoming hopelessly tangled in the drag chute. The tangled chute was the last of a seemingly endless sequence of failures after the previous day’s launch. Upon arrival into orbit, one of the craft’s solar panels failed to deploy, leaving the orbiter without sufficient power to maneuver. After a fate-tempting thirteen cycles around the planet, and with Komarov quickly losing his ability to stabilize the Soyuz, the decision was made to attempt re-entry, with results that were -- to understate the matter -- less than optimal.

The entire Soyuz project had been a chaotic mess to this point -- a situation that Komarov’s death only underscored. Previous unmanned Soyuz test flights had all ended badly, and it was widely known among the Soviet engineers and cosmonauts that the program was riddled with flaws. Despite the knowledge that literally hundreds of design problems jeopardized the launch, Party officials were determined to move ahead so that the first Soyuz missions would coincide with state celebrations of Lenin’s birthday. Before the launch, Komarov himself joked that if he were bumped from the mission, Yuri Gagarin -- a national hero -- would die instead.

Americans listening to Soviet radio transmissions claimed later that they could hear Komarov -- who had been able to say goodbye to his wife and children before re-entry -- cursing and berating the engineers and flight planners as his ship scorched the atmosphere at 400 miles an hour.

October 5

The British airship R101 -- the largest dirigible in the world when it was completed -- crashed on its maiden voyage, 77 years ago today. After lifting off from Cardington, England, on the evening of October 4, 1930, the massive craft ambled its way toward Paris en route to Egypt and its final destination of Karachi, which was at the time part of colonial India. Although the ship had encountered numerous problems during its test flights -- including leaky gas bags and near-catastrophic instability -- the Air Ministry was determined that the R101 take to the air. It was especially concerned that the R101 be airworthy in time for its most notable passenger, Brigadier General Lord Christopher Thompson, to make the Imperial Conference scheduled to open in Karachi on October 20.

When the R101 departed England, the Air Ministry and the ship’s pilots understood that they would likely encounter storm conditions over the English Channel as well as in France. At a altitude of 1500 feet, the 777-foot dirigible enjoyed little room for accident or error. After encountering heavy wind gusts in northern France, the airship dove toward the ground; presumably, the wind had torn off part of the outer covering and damaged of the hydrogen bladders that held it aloft. Although the craft struck the ground at a mere 13 miles per hour, the combination of hydrogen and 25 tons of diesel fuel quickly set the craft alight. Only eight of the 54 passengers and crew managed to escape the wreckage before it was completely overwhelmed in flame. Two of the eight later died of injuries sustained in the accident; one of these described the flight as “rather bumpy, but not exceptionally so.”

The skeleton of the R101 lingered for months as a tourist attraction until scrap workers salvaged several thousand kilograms of material. Much of the recycled steel wound up in the hands of the German company Zeppelin.

Five years later, the R101 was surpassed in size by a German Zeppelin called the Hindenburg; at 804 feet in length, the Hindenburg outdistanced its incinerated British cousin by 27 feet. In May 1937, the Hindenburg -- never to be outdone -- also surpassed another record set by the R101, exceeding its death toll by exactly two dozen lives.

It is not known whether the Hindenburg was constructed in part from remnants of the R101.

June 6

On this date in 1242, Church authorities in Paris set fire to 24 wagonloads of Jewish books. The bonfire was conducted in a manner consistent with the wishes of the late Pope Gregory IX, who had issued that all Hebrew texts were to be seized on Saturday, 3 March 1240, while French Jews were attending synagogue. The confiscated texts were then scoured by Dominican and Franciscan censors, who were charged with identifying and incinerating works that contained “errors” and were “injurious” to Christianity.

Precisely 510 years after the Paris book burning, an enormous fire -- the third in as many weeks -- gutted a full third of Moscow. One hundred and thirty-seven years later, on 6 June 1889, a tipped glue pot in a Seattle carpentry shop caught fire and quickly spread throughout the wharf and downtown commercial district. Remarkably, no lives were lost in the disaster, although nearly sixty blocks of mostly wooden buildings were reduced to ash.

On 6 June 1971. a commercial DC-9 and a Marine F4 Phantom collided in mid-air near Duarte, California. The wing of the Phantom severed the cockpit from the cabin of Airwest Flight 706; both planes then tumbled 15,000 feet into the San Gabriel Mountains, killing everyone but the Marine co-pilot, who managed to eject from the doomed fighter and parachute to safety. Forty-nine passengers and crew members died on Flight 706, whose final destination that night was to be the city of Seattle.

May 25

On this date in 1979, the state of Florida plugged in its electric chair for the first time in 15 years and executed John Spenkelink; this was the first involuntary execution in the United States since the Supreme Court restored the death penalty three years earlier. Spenkelink, a 30-year-old prison escapee from California, had been convicted killing Joseph Szymankiewicz in a Tallahassee hotel room in February 1973. The two men -- both of whom had extensive criminal records -- had been traveling together when Symankiewicz allegedly forced Spenkelink at gunpoint to perform an unspecified sexual act, then insisted the two play several rounds of Russian routlette. When the men arrived in Tallahassee, Spenkelink discovered that his money had been stolen. Enraged, Spenkelink waited until Szymankiewicz was asleep, then shot him twice and bludgeoned him with a hatchet.

At the time of the murder, Florida’s death penalty statute -- like every other such law in the nation -- had been thrown out by the Supreme Court, which ruled in Furman v. Georgia (1972) that capital punishment in the United States was administered “wantonly and freakishly” and that every law (as written) violated the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. Florida was the first state to revise its death penalty code in line with the Court’s recommendations, and when a Tallahassee jury convicted him in December 1973, it recommended that Spenkelink be put to death. In 1976, the Supreme Court’s decision in Gregg v. Georgia allowed the Sunshine State -- along with Georgia and Texas -- to resume the killing.

John Spenkelink’s death warrant was first signed by Gov. Ruben Askew in 1977; after Spenkelink’s legal challenges proved fruitless, Askew’s successor Bob Graham finished the job. On 25 May 1979, Spenkelink was offered two swigs of whiskey before three massive jolts of electricity ended his life. According to legend, John Arthur Spenkelink’s last words were, “them without the capital get the punishment.”

Later that afternoon, an American Airlines DC-10 took off from Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. As the plane sped down the runway, its left engine detached and tumbled across the wing, severing vital hydraulic lines that would otherwise have allowed the craft to land safely. After 31 seconds in the air, as the pilot struggled to stabilize the aircraft and return it to the ground, Flight 191 banked sharply to the left and plunged nose-first into a nearby field. The 271 passengers and crew died instantly, while two victims on the ground perished when debris from the wreck scattered into a mobile home park. The crash remains the deadliest accidental air disaster in US history.

May 7

A horrific tornado reduced the city of Natchez, Mississippi to splinters on this date in 1840. The twister hit ground 20 miles to the southeast on the morning of May 7 and wound its way northward , stripping everything in its path. Along the way, the tornado sank steamboats like the Hinds, the Prairie and the St. Lawrence; it devastated the plantations of David Barland and P.M. Lapice.; then came Natchez, the oldest European settlement along the Mississippi River.

The Natchez Free Trader later described the mid-day arrival of the twister

The dinner bells in the large hotels had rung and most . . . citizens were sitting at their tables when suddenly, the atmosphere was darkened, so as to require the lighting of candles; and, in a few moments afterwards, the rain was precipitated in tremendous cataracts rather than in drops. In another moment the tornado, in all its wrath, was upon us. The strongest buildings shook as if tossed with an earthquake. The air was black with whirling eddies of house walls, roofs chimneys, huge timbers torn from distant ruins, all shot through the air as if thrown from a mighty catapult.

After five minutes, most of the town lay in ruins. In addition to the wind damage, the extremely low air pressure caused many buildings to burst from the inside. More than a hundred boats, many of which bore food and other supplies for the surrounding county, were gone. In their wake, the river filled with pork, bacon, butter, lard, and vegetables in addition to the bodies of hundreds of dock workers and shipmen.

The official death toll was eventually placed at 317, though that figure was quite likely understated the human cost of the disaster, since enslaved people were not included in the tally.

***

On the 124th anniversary of the Natchez tornado and 49 years after a German torpedo sent the Lusitania to the bottom of the sea, a depressed San Francisco warehouse worker brought down a Pacific Airlines turboprop by shooting the pilot and co-pilot during an early morning flight home from Reno. The National Transportation Safety Board described the incident as an “act of self-destruction.” In addition to the shooter, 43 other people died when the plane crashed into a hill near San Ramon. No one survived.

With the benefit of hindsight, there were plenty of subtle clues that something like this might happen. Frank Gonzalez, who had traveled to Reno to gamble away the rest of his savings, had been telling friends and co-workers for weeks that he would die in early May. The day before his return to California, Gonzales purchased a .357 revolver. He would later display his new weapon to friends at the airport, where he purchased $105,000 in life insurance and told several people that he was planning to kill himself.

April 24

The Cold War rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union claimed another victim forty years ago today, when cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov plummeted 150 miles to Earth aboard the Soyuz I spacecraft. The accident took place three months after the United States lost three astronauts in the Apollo 1 fire; it set the Soviet space program back by nearly two years, helping to assure that the United States would be the first superpower to reach the Moon.

Described posthumously by the Communist Party as “a loyal son of our motherland and a courageous explorer of space,” Komarov was incinerated when the ship struck the ground near Orenburg, Siberia after both its main and reserve parachutes failed, with the latter becoming hopelessly tangled in the drag chute. The tangled chute was the last of a seemingly endless sequence of failures after the previous day’s launch. Upon arrival into orbit, one of the craft’s solar panels failed to deploy, leaving the orbiter without sufficient power to maneuver. After a fate-tempting thirteen cycles around the planet, and with Komarov quickly losing his ability to stabilize the Soyuz, the decision was made to attempt re-entry, with results that were -- to understate the matter -- less than optimal.

The entire Soyuz project had been a chaotic mess to this point -- a situation that Komarov’s death only underscored. Previous unmanned Soyuz test flights had all ended badly, and it was widely known among the Soviet engineers and cosmonauts that the program was riddled with flaws. Despite the knowledge that literally hundreds of design problems jeopardized the launch, Party officials were determined to move ahead so that the first Soyuz missions would coincide with state celebrations of Lenin’s birthday. Before the launch, Komarov himself joked that if he were bumped from the mission, Yuri Gagarin -- a national hero -- would die instead.

Americans listening to Soviet radio transmissions claimed later that they could hear Komarov -- who had been able to say goodbye to his wife and children before re-entry -- cursing and berating the engineers and flight planners as his ship scorched the atmosphere at 400 miles and hour.

(Last year's post)

March 23

Thirteen years ago today, a Russian teenager accidentally killed 75 people -- including himself -- when he caused an Aeroflot Airbus A310 to plummet earthward into the Altain Mountains near Siberian city of Mezhdurechensk. Eldar Krudinsky was the 15-year-old son of the plane’s pilot, Yaroslav, who allowed his son and daughter to sit with him in the cockpit during a flight from Moscow to Hong Kong. While his father was demonstrating the plane’s navigational features to his children, Eldar momentarily turned the control wheel just enough to partially disengage the autopilot. By the time anyone noticed, the aircraft had entered into a 90-degree bank that soon turned into steep upward pitch as the autopilot overcompensated for the sudden change of course. As the pilot and co-pilot struggled valiantly, the plane stalled, entered into a spin, and struck the ground two minutes later.

Investigators later determined that if the pilots had not seized the steering column in an attempt to regain control of the doomed plane, the autopilot would have corrected the problem.

The Flight 593 disaster brought that year’s Aeroflot death toll to 194 passengers, as the Russian company cemented its reputation as one of the most dangerous carriers on the planet; oddly enough, Aeroflot has not had a fatal accident since.