Continental Airlines Flight 11

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

**Continental Airlines Flight 11**
Summary
Date	May 22, 1962
Type	Bombing
Site	Unionville, Missouri
Fatalities	45
Injuries	0
Aircraft
Aircraft type	Boeing 707
Operator	Continental Airlines
Tail number	N70775
Passengers	37
Crew	8
Survivors	0

Continental Airlines Flight 11, registration N70775, was a Boeing 707 aircraft which exploded close to Centerville, Iowa while en route from O'Hare Airport, Chicago, Illinois, to Kansas City, Missouri on May 22, 1962. The aircraft crashed in a clover field near Unionville, Missouri in Putnam County, Missouri killing all 45 crew and passengers on board. This was the first sabotage of a commercial jet aircraft in passenger service.

Flight 11 departed O'Hare at 8:35 PM. The flight was routine until just before the Mississippi River, when it deviated from its filed flight plan to the north to avoid a line of thunderstorms. In the vicinity of Centerville, Iowa, the radar image of the aircraft disappeared from the scope of the Waverly, Iowa, Flight Following Service. At approximately 9:17 PM an explosion occured in the right rear lavatory resulting in separation of the tail section from the fuselage. The aircraft broke up and the main part of the fuselage struck the ground about 6 miles north northwest of Unionville, Missouri in Putnam County, Missouri. Witnesses in and around Cincinnati, Iowa, and Unionville, Missouri heard loud and unusual noises at around 9:20 PM; two saw a big flash or ball of fire in the sky. A B-47 Stratojet bomber out of Forbes Air Force Base in Topeka, Kansas, was flying at the altitude of 26,500 feet in the vicinity of Kirksville, Missouri. The aircraft commander saw a bright flash in the sky forward of and above his position. After referring to his navigation logs he estimated the flash to have occurred at 9:22 PM near the location where the last radar target of Flight 11 had been seen. Most of the fuselage was found near Unionville, Missouri, but the engines and parts of the empennage and left wing were found up to six miles away from the main wreckage.

44 of the individuals on board were dead when rescuers reached the wreckage. One passenger, 27-year old Takehiko Nakano of Evanston, Illinois, was alive when rescuers found him, but died from his injuries at Saint Joseph Mercy Hospital in Centerville, Iowa 1 1/2 hours after being rescued. Fred P. Herman, a recipient of the United States Medal of Freedom, was among the passengers.

FBI agents discovered that one of the passengers, Thomas G. Doty, a married man with a five-year-old daughter, had purchased a life insurance policy from Mutual of Omaha for $150,000, the maximum available; his death would also bring in another $150,000 in additional insurance (some purchased at the airport) and death benefits. Doty had recently been arrested for armed robbery and was to soon face a preliminary hearing in the matter. Investigators determined that Doty had purchased dynamite shortly before the crash, and were able to deduce that a bomb had been placed in the used towel bin of the right rear lavatory.

This incident might have been the inspiration for the novel Airport by Arthur Hailey. The plot features a passenger who buys a large amount of insurance using his last few dollars and subsequently blows up the plane with dynamite in the lavatory. However, the novel ends with the safe return of the plane to a snow-covered airport with few casualties.

Flight Number 11 is still used today on Continental's Paris-Houston route.