What led to this deadly disaster? It started with a casual conversation in the cockpit

Part 3 of 5

The skies were cloudy and the ground was covered by a patchy blanket of fog in Charlotte on the morning of September 11th, 1974.

But it wasn’t bad weather or poor visibility that led to the devastating Eastern Air Lines Flight 212 crash that killed 72 people during final approach on its way in from Charleston, S.C.

It also wasn’t any sort of mechanical or maintenance issue — in fact, an altitude alert sounded to indicate that the airplane was only 1,000 feet above the ground. And although hijackings were a growing fear in the airline industry in 1974, the idea of the disaster being caused by a bomb or other act of terrorism had been ruled out very quickly.

No, when the National Transportation Safety Board issued its official final report in May of 1975, more than eight months later, the findings were clear: The pilots had demonstrated what investigators characterized as “poor cockpit discipline.”

Part of the problem was that both Captain James Reeves and First Officer Jim Daniels had become fixated on trying to visually identify Carowinds’ 262-foot-tall Carolina Skytower attraction, which in the 18 months since the amusement park opened had become a notable waypoint for pilots coming into Douglas Municipal Airport from the south.

In the final moments before the crash, the cockpit voice recorder transcript showed, Reeves and Daniels made a dozen remarks related to the Carowinds tower. Those remarks suggested the pilots were spending too much time and energy looking outside of the cockpit and not enough looking at their instruments, namely the three altimeters that would have indicated to them exactly how far above the ground the plane was flying.

On top of that, they might have had a better sense of where they were and what they were seeing if they hadn’t been engaged in a remarkably casual conversation in the minutes prior that ranged from politics to used cars, and included charged viewpoints about segregated schools and people of Arabic descent.

“I heard this morning the news while I was … might stop proceedings against impeachment,” Reeves said, on Richard Nixon resigning the presidency the month before — with the words between “was” and “might” rendered unintelligible due to a noise that investigators determined sounded an awful lot like a low-altitude alert.

Daniels was flying the plane at the time, with Reeves in a supervisory role. As they approached Charlotte, Reeves continued: “Because you can’t have a … pardon for Nixon and the Watergate people.” After meandering through small talk interrupted periodically by interaction with air-traffic control, the Carowinds debate commenced; and then the plane sank into the fog.

Even as they waffled about whether or not they’d passed the tower yet, Daniels couldn’t strictly keep to the business at hand, at one point saying in regards to the park: “It’s supposed to be real nice.”

“All we got to do is find the airport,” Reeves said, roughly a minute and a half later.

“Yeah,” Daniels agreed.

Immediately after that, both men can be heard shouting. Then the plane smashed into the ground, and the excruciating pain and suffering of those unlucky enough to be on board that day began.

Sorting out Flight 212’s survivors

On most mornings, Dr. Bill Shelley would have been pulling into the parking lot at Charlotte Memorial Hospital for a packed day of work as the institution’s director of pathology.

But on this particular Wednesday morning, the 46-year-old father of three arrived in an ambulance, clinging to his life, having suffered severe burns to most of his body, his right leg broken and his left leg violently cut off below the knee.

His face was so badly burned that a physician he personally knew rushed in to provide emergency care for Shelley and didn’t even recognize him.

“Tom,” the wounded doctor-suddenly-turned-patient rasped, “it’s me. It’s Bill Shelley.”

Barely half an hour earlier, Shelley had been sitting on Flight 212 as he returned home from a medical conference in Charleston, when the DC-9 aircraft crashed into a cornfield a few miles shy of Douglas Municipal Airport, broke apart and burst into searing balls of flames.

The hospital’s staff had braced for an onslaught of wounded after learning of the disaster, an army of ambulances having descended on the farm to the southwest of the city center where the plane’s carcass lay burning. Of the 82 people on board, however, Shelley was one of just 13 still breathing by that afternoon.

Besides Shelley, the most seriously injured were Debra Sanders of New York and Deanne Tracy of Ohio, who had at least two significant things in common when they arrived at Charlotte Memorial: Both were 17 years old, and both had suffered burns over 90% of their bodies.

On the other end of the spectrum was Colette Watson, the senior flight attendant on Eastern 212; she’d somehow managed to walk away virtually unscathed.

Then somewhere in the middle was Daniels, the co-pilot who was at the controls when the plane went down. He fractured his right shin and left kneecap in the crash.

With his captain dead, Daniels was the only person on the planet that morning who might have had the faintest idea how all of this happened — all this destruction, all this death — and even he wasn’t entirely sure in the how they had miscalculated so egregiously.

But for now, as the wreckage continued smoldering, the No. 1 priority was trying to keep the few survivors alive, followed closely by an equally taxing task: notifying the dozens of families of passengers who didn’t make it.

‘Did you hear about this plane crash?’

This was, of course, years before the widespread use of the internet and cell phones, so news of the crash spread through radio and TV bulletins, phone calls and word of mouth.

As a result, figuring out if you had a loved one on the plane, or whether they’d survived, wasn’t straightforward.

Peggy Toohey was watching television at home in Charleston when a local news anchor started in with the story of the Eastern crash. Knowing her husband John had caught the early flight to Charlotte on his way up to Connecticut for his father’s funeral, she initially felt certain that he was dead. She let loose with a guttural scream that chilled their 11-year-old daughter Charli’s spine.

Across town, 30-year-old Tommy Ford was picking up a phone call from his dad.

“Did you hear about this plane crash?” his father asked him. Tommy had.

“It’s gonna hit some people around here,” his dad said, anticipating many victims would have Charleston ties. The elder Ford said he’d been informed that Tommy’s brother, Frank, had actually driven to Charlotte earlier in the morning, and both expressed relief that he had chosen not to fly.

Frank hadn’t checked in with the family yet that day, but they all were eager to connect with him to hear about the buzz up in Charlotte.

It would be hours before they’d learn from Frank’s secretary that she’d booked him a last-minute flight after all, and even longer before they’d get confirmation that Frank was indeed on Flight 212. It was the worst of the worst-case scenarios. He had not survived.

By then, Peggy Toohey also had gotten word about her husband. John was a Navy man, and a naval officer called to say something that surprised her almost as much as that morning TV report: John is alive. He was being transferred to the naval hospital in Charleston to get treatment for non-life-threatening burn injuries.

Similar dramas were playing out all over Charleston, but particularly within the naval community. More than a dozen Navy men were on board the plane, and their endings predominantly were unhappy ones.

Navy brothers John and Louie Pinheiro, for instance, had planned to both pay a $25 fee that would excuse them from a military ceremony so they could fly home to Boston early that Wednesday; but on short notice, Louie decided to save the money, attend the ceremony, and catch a later flight. On the way to the Charleston airport, Louie was asked by his cab driver if he’d heard about the plane crash in North Carolina. His heart sank. Another hour and a half or so later, his 11:35 a.m. flight passed directly over the rescue vehicles and the DC-9’s remains.

That afternoon, Louie received confirmation his brother was among the dead.

Sonny Hendrix, 11 at the time, found out upon getting home from football practice that his Navy-officer dad — Roy Hendrix — had survived. (Ultimately, in fact, five of the survivors would turn out to be active Navy men.) But as news circulated around the Charleston Naval Base, Sonny would learn that “a lot of my friends’ dads were dead.”

Among the victims: 3 named Colbert

Back at Memorial Hospital in Charlotte — as healthcare workers fought to save the lives of Bill Shelley, Debra Sanders and Deanne Tracy — Flight 212 survivor Charles Weaver fought back tears as he spoke with a reporter while shifting around uncomfortably on an emergency-room stretcher.

“There was no warning,” said Weaver, a plant manager at Amstar Corporation (now Domino Foods) and 43-year-old father of five. “I looked out and saw the ground and I knew we were going to crash.”

His hands and head were swathed in bandages covering burns, and his sideburns, eyebrows and eyelashes were singed.

“I don’t know how I got out,” he continued. And then, as his eyes welled up again, he asked if the reporter knew anything about the condition of his best friend Harry Grady, who had traded seats with Weaver right before takeoff.

Grady, Weaver would learn, had died on the edge of that cornfield.

Also among the dead were four boarding-school-bound teenagers — Ned Thornhill (age 14, who was sitting next to his dad’s friend, Frank Ford); David Ball (16); and brothers Paul (15) and Peter (18) Colbert.

The Colbert teens perished alongside their father, James Colbert, who as vice president for academic affairs at Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston had often taken Eastern 212 for business but on this fateful day was accompanying his sons to their school in Connecticut. James Colbert left behind his wife Lorna and nine other children, the youngest being 10-year-old son Stephen.

That Wednesday, Stephen was at school when his older brother Billy showed up unexpectedly in his powder-blue Ford Pinto to collect him.

“Why are you picking me up?” the now-CBS late-night talk-show host remembered asking his brother, during a 2022 guest appearance on CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s “All There Is” podcast about grief. “And he didn’t answer. And I knew something was wrong. And then he drove me home. And I knew that Dad and the boys had left that morning. But I hadn’t quite done the math.”

Colbert recalled walking into a room where his mother, Lorna, was lying on the bed. She looked, Colbert said, “like she’d been thrown there. Like she’d been standing next to the bed and a giant had struck her.” Then she uttered four words he would never forget:

“There’s been an accident.”

The very next morning, Watson — the miraculously unhurt flight attendant — was reliving her own harrowing near-death experience with a representative from the National Transportation Safety Board, which would spend the next eight months investigating the cause of the crash.

In the interview, she recalled asking the co-pilot, Daniels, as they were trying to get clear of the wreckage, “Do you have any idea what happened?”

“My God, Colette — no,” she remembered him replying. “We got no warning light. Nothing. I just don’t know.”

It would be weeks before his and James Reeves’ “poor cockpit discipline” would come to light publicly. However, in the days that followed, wild conspiracy theories about why the plane had gone down were being tossed around by word of mouth.

According to one, Navy Admiral Charles Cummings, who died in the crash, had been the target of a KGB hit. Another suggested that two first-class passengers were drug dealers, and that a drug cartel had orchestrated a terror attack. There was even an unfounded rumor that the plane had been carrying an illicit shipment of ether, which is what the conspiracy theorists surmised had caused the explosions and fires.

But the only certainty in the immediate aftermath was that the suffering of the victims and their families was far from over.

‘Your chances of death are 97%’

Three days after arriving in the ICU at Charlotte Memorial Hospital, Debra Sanders succumbed to her massive injuries. Within another three days, Deanne Tracy, the other 17-year-old, was also dead.

By this point, a week out from the crash, nine of the survivors — Watson, Daniels, Bob Burnham, Roy Hendrix, Scott Johnson, Frank Mihalek, James Schulze, John Toohey, and Charles Weaver — were still coping with grievous wounds, if not physical than certainly emotional. But those nine were clearly going to make it.

Two other survivors, meanwhile, were still battling life-threatening injuries.

One was Bill Shelley, the Charlotte doctor-turned-patient. A week after the crash, he was transferred to the Air Force Burn Center at San Antonio, Texas. In addition to his external wounds, Shelley had breathed in so much smoke that there was growing concern about his lungs.

The other was Richard Arnold, a 31-year-old systems engineer for IBM. Searing flames had basically melted his suit right off his body, leaving him nearly naked and with terrible burns. The grisly damage included fingers on his right hand that had been reduced to nubs. He was flown to MUSC in Charleston a few hours after the crash, and when he arrived at the burn unit, one doctor put it to him bluntly: “Your chances of death are 97%. Your chance of survival is 3.”

For weeks afterward, Arnold was subjected to daily rounds of extremely painful debridement procedures, which involved being hosed down with chemicals designed to dissolve damaged and dead tissue to prevent infections. He wouldn’t be discharged until Christmastime, walked with a limp for months after that, and would struggle with his fresh physical deformities for years.

Still, Arnold eventually made a full recovery. Shelley, on the other hand, just kept getting worse. A few weeks after he was moved to San Antonio, his kids were brought to Texas and got one last chance to see him. Their dad died 29 days after the crash, ultimately, his family says, of smoke inhalation.

With that, the final official count was 72 dead, 10 survivors, and hundreds of questions about the crash of Eastern Flight 212 — not the least of which was this one:

What would the punishments be for those responsible?

Coming Tuesday

Part 4 | The Consequences: “I’m human,” the pilot said, “and I made a mistake.” But somebody was going to have to pay.

Eastern Airlines Flight 212 had 82 people on board on Sept. 11, 1974, when it crashed in Charlotte. Of those 82, 72 people died and 10 survived. This seat map illustrates where those 10 survivors were seated. It is approximate and based on Charlotte Observer research and interviews.

Survived Deceased Vacant

The survivors of Flight 212 included co-pilot Jim Daniels, who was seated on the right of the cockpit; flight attendant Colette Watson, seated in a jumpseat behind Daniels facing the first-class seats; and passenger Frank Mihalek, in seat 1B. Pilot James Reeves, on the left side of cockpit, was one of the 72 people who died.

Richard Arnold, who was seated in 5E, was one of the few passengers in the front of the plane who survived. He suffered severe burns. Looking out the window just before the crash, he could see the faces of people on the ground looking up at him. After the crash, he squeezed through an opening in the broken fuselage.

Additional survivors of Flight 212 included Bob Burnham in seat 15E, Charles Weaver in 16C, Roy Hendrix in 17C, Jim Schulze in 17D and John Toohey in 17E. All were seated in the smoking section. Hendrix would later say he was one of the few people in the world who could say “smoking saved my life.”

Scott Johnson, who boarded late and was seated in 20E, was in the final row of passenger seats and survived. However, flight attendant Eugenia Kerth, seated behind him in a jump seat, perished in the crash. The DC-9 plane was traveling close to 200 mph at impact and crash-landed 3.3 miles short of its intended runway.

Eastern Flight 212 remains the deadliest disaster in Charlotte aviation history. The 50th anniversary of the crash is Sept. 11, 2024. Of the 10 survivors of the crash, three remain alive today. The Charlotte Observer talked to all three, as well as family members of the other seven survivors, while researching this story and chart.

How we reported this story

The Charlotte Observer series “9/11/74,” detailing the plane crash of Eastern Flight 212 in Charlotte and its aftermath, was reported and written by Scott Fowler and Théoden Janes.

Current photographs are by visual journalist Jeff Siner, while historical photographs mostly come from former Charlotte Observer photographer Don Sturkey. Videos are by Siner and Diamond Vences. Gavin Off contributed research. Taylor Batten and The’ Pham were the series editors. This series is based primarily on dozens of new interviews conducted by The Observer with all the remaining survivors and their families, families of victims, crash investigators, aviation experts and first responders.

A trove of recently discovered and previously unreported transcribed interviews with the plane crash survivors — conducted by the National Transportation Safety Board in 1974 only a few days after the incident — was also relied upon for verification. In those interviews, survivors recounted in detail what they were thinking during the crash and its aftermath.

Janes and Fowler also pored over thousands of documents related to the crash; found additional material through library visits, the 1977 book “Final Approach” and FOIA requests; and visited Charlotte’s Sullenberger Aviation Museum and the crash site.

On Wednesday, Sept. 18, The Charlotte Observer will host free events at 11:30 a.m. and at 7:00 p.m. at Charlotte’s Independent Picture House that will include a screening of “9/11/74,” The Observer’s 30-minute documentary about the crash of Eastern Flight 212. Following the screening, panel discussions about the series will feature plane crash survivors, family members, reporters Scott Fowler and Théoden Janes, and others. Tickets are free, but RSVPs are required. Details here.

Additional Credits

Sohail Al-Jamea | Graphics

Rachel Handley | Illustrations & Design

David Newcomb | Development & Design