TWA Flight 599
Encyclopedia
Transcontinental and Western Air Flight 599 was a Fokker F.10 Trimotor
Fokker F.10
|-See also:...

 en route from Kansas City, Missouri
Kansas City, Missouri
Kansas City, Missouri is the largest city in the U.S. state of Missouri and is the anchor city of the Kansas City Metropolitan Area, the second largest metropolitan area in Missouri. It encompasses in parts of Jackson, Clay, Cass, and Platte counties...

, to Los Angeles, California
Los Angeles, California
Los Angeles , with a population at the 2010 United States Census of 3,792,621, is the most populous city in California, USA and the second most populous in the United States, after New York City. It has an area of , and is located in Southern California...

, on March 31, 1931. It crashed a few miles north west of Bazaar, Kansas
Bazaar, Kansas
Bazaar is an unincorporated community in Chase County, Kansas, United States. The community is part of the Emporia Micropolitan Statistical Area. It is notable for being near the place of the 1931 Trans World Airlines Flight 599 crash that killed University of Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne...

; all eight on board died. One of those killed was Knute Rockne
Knute Rockne
Knute Kenneth Rockne was an American football player and coach. He is regarded as one of the greatest coaches in college football history...

, the head football coach at the University of Notre Dame
University of Notre Dame
The University of Notre Dame du Lac is a Catholic research university located in Notre Dame, an unincorporated community north of the city of South Bend, in St. Joseph County, Indiana, United States...

, 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
Thunderstorm
A thunderstorm, also known as an electrical storm, a lightning storm, thundershower or simply a storm is a form of weather characterized by the presence of lightning and its acoustic effect on the Earth's atmosphere known as thunder. The meteorologically assigned cloud type associated with the...

, 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
Wood
Wood is a hard, fibrous tissue found in many trees. It has been used for hundreds of thousands of years for both fuel and as a construction material. It is an organic material, a natural composite of cellulose fibers embedded in a matrix of lignin which resists compression...

 laminate; in this instance, moisture had leaked into the interior of one wing over a period of time 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
Aeroelasticity
Aeroelasticity is the science which studies the interactions among inertial, elastic, and aerodynamic forces. It was defined by Arthur Collar in 1947 as "the study of the mutual interaction that takes place within the triangle of the inertial, elastic, and aerodynamic forces acting on structural...

 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
Trans World Airlines
Trans World Airlines was an American airline that existed from 1925 until it was bought out by and merged with American Airlines in 2001. It was a major domestic airline in the United States and the main U.S.-based competitor of Pan American World Airways on intercontinental routes from 1946...

 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 U.S. Senator Bronson M. Cutting
Bronson M. Cutting
Bronson Murray Cutting was a United States Senator from New Mexico, publisher, and military attaché.-Biography:Bronson Cutting was born in Great River, Long Island, New York, on June 23, 1888 at his family's country seat of Westbrook. He was the third of four children born to William Bayard...

 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

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