I finished this January 13, 2011 work day at a business dinner in Manhattan Beach. It is approximately a six mile drive between Westchester and Manhattan Beach. I drove the coast route home; past the Scattergood Generating Station and the Los Angeles Hyperion¸ and up past the beaches of Playa Del Rey; the beaches of my youth. They are still of course my beaches, but what is preserved in my youthful memories of Gillis and Toe’s Beach, are far more memorable and poignant than my current experiences there.
In 1969, through some minor miracle, the benevolent Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth graduated me from Visitation Catholic School. They were certainly glad to be rid of me and many of my classmates (you know who you are), and I am sure that my mother’s novenas had something to do with it, and the Sisters lived up to their name.
A few months earlier, on January 13, 1969, it was a distance of six nautical miles from the Santa Monica Bay off Playa Del Rey to LAX, where Scandinavian Airlines Flight 933 dropped from the sky and into the Pacific Ocean. The jetliner’s crew members were preoccupied with a landing-gear light problem and didn’t notice the aircraft’s gradual descent toward the sea, and crashed on that dark moonless evening.
The Captain; Kenneth Davies, and his flight crew, survived the crash. Of the 45 passengers onboard the DC-8 aircraft, 3 passengers and 1 cabin attendant drowned. Many other passengers and members of the crew were injured, but 13 passengers survived unscathed. To this day, 9 passengers and 2 cabin attendants are still missing; and of course presumed dead and now lost to the sea.
The parents of a dear friend and classmate at Visitation School were aboard the flight, and were responsible for getting many of the survivors off of the plane and into life rafts and were applauded for their unselfish efforts. They too made it to safety, and lived for many years afterwards on 87thStreet. The husband was a Los Angeles Fire Department Battalion Captain, and well trained in emergency training. A few years later, I tried to bring up the subject of the crash once or twice to her and her parents, but they did not want to discuss it.
Most of the plane sank immediately, but the forward cabin and cockpit floated for close to 20 hours. It was eventually towed to shore and recovered. The balance of the fuselage sits there still; rusting and decomposing in 350 feet of water.
SAS DC-8. The Scandinavian Airlines System Flight SK933, a McDonnell Douglas DC-8 Series 62, registered LN-MOO, named Sverre Viking, of Norwegian registry, crashed in Santa Monica Bay, approximately 6 nautical miles (11 km) west of the Los Angeles International Airport, Los Angeles, California, at approximately 19:21 P.S.T., January 13, 1969. The aircraft was operating as Flight SK933 from Seattle, Washington, to Los Angeles, California, following a flight from Copenhagen, Denmark. A scheduled crew change occurred at Seattle for the flight to Los Angeles. (Complements, Wikipedia).
Believe it or not, many local residents joined in the search in the aftermath of the crash. As young surfers, my friends and I knew that beach well, and for days we scoured the shoreline; recovering clothing, suitcases and other parts of the plane; washed up on the beach. We combed up and down Dockweiler State Beach, and piled up what we found into heaps on the sand beyond the high tide line. Lifeguard’s in yellow pick-up trucks collected the belongings and took them to the main lifeguard station.
I recovered a gray Samsonite two-suiter, which was floating in a few feet of water. It was locked and unmarked, and to this day I can’t help but wonder who it belonged to. The elastic band that held the luggage tag was still attached, but the paper identification tag had disintegrated in the salt water.
I wonder if a surviving passenger had used it as an impromptu life raft, or had it been jettisoned too far from the plane crash and was too far from the wreckage to be of use. Maybe it belonged to one of passengers that had drowned, or maybe one day it was returned to the owner, who somewhere on the face of the planet is also remembering his or her memories of that tragic winter day.
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