April 14, 2022
Volume 52 - No. 15
By Cecil Scaglione
Atop one of my bookshelves is the model of a jetliner with a long twotone orange stripe along its body and smile under its nose that is an endless reminder of the day that changed our part of the world.
My opening memory of that day is of a pile of gray-black smoke being sucked up by Santa Ana winds into the clear blue sky from a hill overlooking Mission Valley.
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Probably a house fire, I thought as I drove to work at the San Diego Union on that pleasant fall morning. There was a house burning, of course – 22 of them. It was Monday, Sept. 25, 1978.
The lives of 144 people were snuffed out in an instant in a quiet North Park neighborhood.
A Pacific Southwest Airlines Boeing 727 had smacked into a small Cessna 172 and both crippled aircraft crashed within seconds.
The passengers and crew aboard Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 182 that originated in Sacramento were annihilated in a blinding flash when their jet aircraft plowed into the ground. So were the lives of five women and two children who lived there. About six blocks away, the instructor and student pilot in the small plane that collided with the jet also died as pieces of their propellered aircraft toppled to earth. The event became known simply as Flight 182. It was the deadliest aviation disaster
PSA Flight 182 Continued on Page 2
in U.S. history up to that time. Exactly eight months later, an American Airlines DC-10 tumbled into a field off the end of the Chicago’s O’Hare Field when an engine flew off one of its wings during takeoff. All 271 passengers and crew on board were killed.
Strolling into the editorial room after PSA Flight 182 went down was definitely different that day. It was really really really quiet. An editor saw me approach, let me dump my stuff on my desk and then said, “You don’t know what’s hap-