The night of the glowing pink snow, when an airliner crashed nearby
By James P. Gannon
Looking out my window this morning, I am reminded of winters in Minnesota during my boyhood. The stone wall behind our home near Flint Hill, which stands about four feet high, is nearly invisible, with only the top stones poking up out of the drifting snow.
The wind is whipping whirls of snow across the landscape, which is frozen and totally lacking in signs of motion or life. The birds are gone; the deer are gone. No one drives down the road in front. When the wind gusts, there is a white-out, erasing the view of our neighbor’s house across the road. I think of scenes in the movie, Dr. Zhivago–Siberian deep freeze.
The plane that crashed: Martin 202
Winters in Minneapolis in the 1950s, when I was in grade school, were brutal. Our family cars, parked on the street, would be buried by the snowplows. The winter of 1950-51 brought 89 inches of snow–no, I don’t remember that figure but I just looked it up (the miracle of Google). It was the third highest snowfall total for the Twin Cities ever recorded.
It was the winter of 1950 when a passenger airliner crashed in a snowstorm near our neighborhood. Our home was only a few miles from the end of the runway at the Minneapolis airport, then called Wold-Chamberlain Field. I have a vivid memory of that tragedy.
I was looking out our front window at the heavy falling snow that evening when the whole street lit up in a bright pink glow. We had no idea what caused that at the time, but learned later that night that an airplane came down in a nearby neighborhood along Minnehaha Creek, wiping out a couple of homes and killing all on board and two children in one of the homes. For some reason, I remember the plane was a Martin 202.
The Northwest Airlines plane was attempting an instrument landing in a heavy snowstorm when one of its wings clipped a high flagpole at the Fort Snelling national cemetery next to the airport. The pilot apparently pulled up to try another approach, and flew over our neighborhood, where he lost part of the wing, which fell near a local water tower.
The plane, carrying 13 passengers, plunged into a home where a mother had just tucked her two children, ages 8 and 10, into bed. The plane and the home burst into a fireball, killing the children and leaving the mother bleeding and weeping in the snow outside.
Most of this detail comes from finding old news articles and reports via Google. What I knew at the time was what I heard in school the next day about a plane falling from the sky, flattening three homes and killing kids. But what I really remember about it all, to this day, is the glowing pink snow.
I never really found out what caused it. One story was that the pilot or co-pilot threw a flare out the window, trying to light up the ground below as he desperately looked for a place to crash-land the crippled plane. Did that flare land in our yard? Or was the plane on fire as he passed overhead?
I won’t ever know. But I will always remember the glowing pink snow. Funny, what memories a real Minnesota-style snowstorm can dredge up from 60 years ago.
Good story. An interesting read, it must have been a little surreal.