Brilliantly sunny mornings in September and American aviation do not have a good relationship with one another.
It will be 30 yrs. ago today, where San Diego was the site of what was then the worst aviation disaster in American history when PSA flight 182 collided mid-air with a tiny Cessna resulting in the loss of all lives (137) aboard both planes.
The 727 plummeted into the community of North Park, just a couple of miles from the Lindbergh Field runway, with its pueblo-style bungalows, palm trees and craftsmans that is at once removed from the popular image of the beach, sand and surf of San Diego, yet like many of its surrounding central city neighborhoods, forms the heart and soul of America’s finest city.
Here’s Ozzie Roberts, who has been writing in San Diego for years, on the 10-year anniversary:
Yayoko Dietz's neighborhood was filled with death one day 10 years ago, and she cannot escape the horror.
The tears flow as she remembers the jetliner tearing through the roof of the house next door as it plunged to the ground outside her home. She remembers the raging fires and billowing smoke. Mostly, however, she remembers the terrifying screams of the dying.
Numbed by the memories, Dietz searches for a way to describe the misery. It was like the day during World War II, said the native of Manchuria, when an American military plane dropped a 500-pound bomb near her Asian home. 
The U-T has a good round-up of articles and photos which can be linked to from the lead article. The slide show, including the iconic photo of the descent of the fiery PSA jetliner can be found here.
We have especially taken-in the reader comments to the various attached/linked articles as we were 6th graders living up in Orange County and the commenters have provided a personal “here and now” accounting of that day’s events and those that followed for our adopted hometown… and now our adopted history.
We welcome the comments and recollections of anyone who has stumbled on to our site and was living here in San Diego on that horrible day.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Tragedy in San Diego
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4 comments:
Strangely, being a not-quite wee tike of 9 years old at the time, I seemed to recall hearing about this on the car radio returning from our annual Labor Day Weekender trip to the Sierras. So that can't be right.
Maybe the crash took place on a Saturday and we were coming back from a football game?
Either way, I remember hearing about it on the car radio. And seeing the photo of the plummeting plane on the KNXT Channel 2 news with Marcia Brandwyn and Connie Chung the next day freaked me out.
- Mongo's Old-Timers disease getting worse...
My family gets frustrated when we start to plan our summer vacation. I am always fast with the idea of traveling by car up the coast or to some rugged camp area. They watch me wince when they suggest Hawaii or other places where an airline trip is required. I try to explain how I loved flying in airplanes until the crash of September 25, 1978 in San Diego.
I was working for a Doctor in Pacific Beach and remember that day clearly. I stood with my coworkers listening to the radio as the tragedy unfolded. We cried listening to the immensity of this disaster. I wondered how this could happen. I had been traveling on PSA flights to Sacramento regularly to visit my boyfriend Jim.
As the days passed horror stories of body parts hitting cars on the freeway were reported as the media interviewed the shocked people who came forward. People found body parts in their backyards that had to be collected for identification purposes. All these stories I followed for the weeks that followed.
My family may finally understand my fear of flying after seeing the special that aired on KUSI. It still stays in my mind, as the events just don’t seem to have happened that long ago.
I was 19yrs old and was working as a Travel Agent at that time. It just seemed to make my job that much more intense at the time of this horrific accident. As many of us growing up in So.Calif we can all relate to seeing small aircraft and commerical airliners flying overhead, but to see the reality of what happens when they fall to earth in a neighborhood much like our own was so scary. For years I always thought that same kind of accident would happen over John Wayne Airport as you see both types of aircraft jockeying for runaway position.
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