The grief and lessons of a Nebraska plane crash

Sixty years ago this week, Braniff International Flight 250 plunged into a Nebraska bean field, killing all 42 aboard. The tragedy led to changes that have helped make flying safer. Richardson County Historical Museum in Falls City, Nebraska, keeps artifacts from the 1966 crash of Braniff International Flight 250. Among its collection are newspaper clippings and two books about the tragedy. (Andrew J. Nelson/Courthouse News) FALLS CITY, Neb. (CN) — It was supposed to be a short hop from Kansas City to Omaha. It was 1966, and one imagines the passengers dressed in suits and skirts in those early glamorous days of air travel. They were likely buckled up for the turbulent flight. The pilots of Braniff Flight 250 knew they would have to contend with storms, but they didn’t know how bad conditions would be. In the cockpit, the onboard radar showed what appeared to be a gap in the storm. The pilot steered toward it. It was a tragic mistake. Massive winds ripped the starboard wing and the tail from the aircraft. It entered a spin, plunging into a bean field in the rolling hills of Richardson County in southeast Nebraska. It went straight down, with an accident report showing no horizontal displacement. The incident killed all 38 passengers and four crewmembers on board. The crash of Flight 250 is not widely remembered by the general public today. But plane enthusiasts sure know it: It was a significant crash in the early decades of passenger air travel, a test case that budding pilots and aviation professionals still study. It was the first crash investigation to use a cockpit voice recorder, and one of the last before the National Transportation Safety Board was created in 1967. British Aircraft Corporation, the plane’s manufacturer, hired Ted Fujita, the meteorologist best known for creating the Fujita scale to measure tornadoes, helping set a new standard for how wind and weather factors are analyzed after crashes. A group of men stands among the wreckage of Braniff Flight 250 after the Aug. 6, 1966, crash that killed all on board near Falls City, Nebraska. (Falls City Journal via Courthouse News) Flight 250 has been the subject of a fiction and nonfiction book. As is fitting for anything 1960s-related, it’s also mentioned in an episode of “Mad Men.” Steve Pollock, who wrote the 2014 nonfiction book “Deadly Turbulence” about the crash, stressed that real people died in the tragedy. And yet he says some good came out of it, in terms of a “really incredible kind of gargantuan effort to figure out what happened and how to prevent it going forward.” Lessons learned from crashes like these have helped make flying a remarkably safe form of travel, Pollock said. “We treat an airplane these days like getting on a somewhat dirty elevator,” he said. “It’s statistically, at this point, probably safer than an elevator.” “There is a reason for that,” he added. “There are human lives, and death that is very much a part of that story." The crash of Flight 250 also remains a big deal for some in Falls City, a modest Nebraska city of around 4,000 near the crash site. As local volunteers tried to help and a public building was converted to a morgue, it remains a tragic chapter in the city’s history. One Falls City family still runs a memorial. Over the years, some families of the deceased crew and passengers have even gotten to know some residents, linked together by shared grief. Among them are Dan Hilliker, whose father died as a first officer on Flight 250. He first visited Falls City around the 40th anniversary in 2006. The crash, he said, had a major impact in how aviation professionals think about and navigate bad weather. “They learned from it,” he said. “It was a seminal moment for aviation.” The tragedy unfolded on Saturday, Aug. 6, 1966. Flight 250 started its day’s itinerary in New Orleans that morning and was headed for Minneapolis that night. Along the way were several stops, including what would turn out to be its last in Kansas