In the first two parts of this look at the New Hope community of Paulding County, we looked at how the tiny crossroads changed from a very remote and isolated frontier outpost to becoming the very center of one of the major battles of the Civil War’s Atlanta Campaign. In this column, we’ll look at an event in 1977 that once again put this still-off the beaten path crossroads on the national map.
The warm and overcast day of April 4, 1977, was a typical mid-spring day in northwestern Georgia and northeastern Alabama, with a line of strong thunderstorms moving through the area by two in the afternoon, and a series of tornado watches had been issued starting at 11:00 that morning, including the area between Atlanta and Huntsville, Alabama. Seven tornadoes were reported in northeastern Alabama between 1 and 4 PM, with multiple reports of exceptionally severe thunderstorms ranging throughout the region. The National Weather Service later determined that this was one of the most severe and fastest moving storm systems on record.
Captain Bill McKenzie and Co-Pilot Lyman Keele, along with flight attendants Cathy Lemoine (Cooper) and Sandy Ward (Purl), had departed Muscle Shoals, Alabama, at 7:47 AM that morning, arriving in Atlanta at 9:25, and returning to Huntsville at 3:44 PM after a series of other intermediate stops. Neither pilot had eaten supper the night before, as they got into their crew rest hotel after every restaurant had closed, and possibly did not get breakfast the morning of April 4, either. They did have a snack in the cockpit during an intermediary stop at Huntsville a little after 1 PM, but didn’t have time for a full meal before the next scheduled departure. McKenzie was given written notice of the tornado watches along their flight path, but was apparently otherwise not briefed about the extreme severity of the developing weather system they would fly through, before departing for Atlanta at 3:54 PM with 81 passengers on board. Operating as Southern Airways Flight 242, they were flying a DC-9-31, tail number N1335U, and had been on duty for nearly nine hours when they took off, with over five hours of actual flight time. One particularity to this aircraft that became significant later was that it was equipped with a Bendix model RDR-1E weather radar, which the crew planned to use to pick their way through the worst thunderstorm cells.
A little after 4 PM, approaching Rome, Georgia, Flight 242 had just begun descending from its cruise altitude of 17,000 feet, part of the approach to Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport, when they encountered the strongest line of thunderstorms. Attempting to pick their way through the least severe areas of this squall line, McKenzie watched the radar display while Keele turned off the autopilot and hand flew the jetliner. McKenzie saw what looked like a clear spot on the radar screen, and directed Keele to slow the jet down a bit, and fly through it, expecting to just pick up some turbulence along the way. Instead, right after air traffic control (ATC) ordered them to descend to 14,000 feet at 4:06 PM, they slammed into a near-solid wall of tornado-force wind, tropical storm force rains and massive amounts of hail, which quickly caused the wings to begin icing up. There is some controversy about exactly what caused this situation, but the “hole” in the radar screen McKenzie had ordered Keele to navigate through was exactly the opposite of where he had wanted to go, it was in fact the heaviest part of a supercell thunderstorm.
At 4:08 PM, the aircraft lost all power in its left engine, flaming out due to the incredible amount of water it was ingesting, and part of the forward windshield shattered from the heavy hailstorm one minute later. At 4:10 PM the right engine flamed out as well, turning the jetliner into a glider well short of the runways at Hartsfield. When McKenzie managed to get the jet’s auxiliary power unit started, restoring electrical power to the radios, ATC was advised of the situation and tried to help redirect the flight to Dobbins Air Reserve Base near Marietta, about twenty miles away in the opposite direction from their position. For the next eight minutes McKenzie frantically tried to restart one of the two engines, while Keele concentrated on extending their glide towards Dobbins as long as possible, while looking for an open field or straight stretch of highway to set down on, and while ATC scrambled to find any other closer airport or facility that could handle the airliner. All efforts to restart the engines failed, the pilots lowered their landing gear, and spotting a relatively straight stretch of highway, made preparations to land on it. At 4:18 PM, McKenzie advised Atlanta approach control, “We’re putting it on the highway, we’re down to nothing."
The two flight attendants had not received any communication from the overworked pilots, but when it was obvious that they had lost both engines and were in a terminal glide, they spontaneously began briefing the passengers on crash procedures. Just before touchdown, Cooper,the lead attendant, saw the tops of pine trees through the windows, and screamed out to the passengers, “Grab your ankles!”
The highway the pilots finally headed for was Georgia Highway Spur 92 (now called the Dallas-Acworth Highway and Georgia State Route 381), right at the New Hope Church crossing. As the jet approached, its wings struck a number of trees before the plane finally slammed down on the left-center of the narrow roadway. As soon as it touched down, before either pilot had time to react, its left wing struck an embankment, wrenching the aircraft hard to the left, and started breaking it apart. It traveled another 1,260 feet on the ground, the wings tearing off and fuselage breaking into five main sections, striking a gas station and a number of vehicles, as well as more trees, telephone poles and fences until it finally came to a flaming stop.
Both pilots were killed in the crash, as were 62 passengers and eight people on the ground. Two more died of their injuries over the next two months. 19 passengers survived the crash, though most were seriously injured and many were burned by the subsequent fires. Cooper and Purl were both injured, but survived the crash and stayed in the wreckage field afterwards, pulling dazed and seriously injured passengers from the debris until fuel-fed fires and explosions forced them to leave the scene. The NTSB later laid the blame for the crash equally on the effects of the severe storm, and the fact that the captain did not have sufficient access to the latest weather reports and warnings. The report did praise the flight attendants for their actions, which undoubtedly saved many more passengers from death, and the airmanship of the two pilots, stating that the “best case” glide for a DC-9 from 14,000 feet was about 34 miles; Keele managed to glide the crippled jet almost 33 miles in the far less than ideal situation.
Purl later wrote a book about her experiences in the crash and the difficulties she suffered afterwards, Am I Alive? A Surviving Flight Attendant's Struggle and Inspiring Triumph Over Tragedy, and one of the surviving passengers, John Tielking,wrote his own book in 1982 about the crash, Hail Fire, heaping praise on the flight attendants for their actions which saved many after the crash.
One odd coincidence about this crash, some of the fuselage sections came to rest in part of the old Civil War battlefield, near where Hindman’s Division of Hood’s Corps had dug in, just up the hill from the ravine that Union soldiers later dubbed the “Hell-Hole.”
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