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TWA Flight 514: Tragedy at Mount Weather
TWA Flight 514: Tragedy at Mount Weather
By John T. Toler
The late morning storm that swept through Northern Virginia on Dec. 1, 1974 was a major factor in the worst mass-casualty incident ever suffered in the Virginia Piedmont region.
Due to the fierce winds and rain, Transworld Airlines (TWA) Flight 514, originating in Indianapolis and en route to Washington, D.C., was diverted from National Airport to Dulles International.
The aircraft, a four-year-old Boeing 727-231 “stretch” jet, was carrying a crew of three men in the cockpit, four female flight attendants, and 85 passengers.
Following instructions from air traffic control at Dulles, the crew lined up with Runway 12 at Dulles. The cockpit voice recorder revealed confusion about the minimum altitude for the approach. complicated by the blinding weather, and about 23 miles west of the airport, the pilots could not see the western slope of the Blue Ridge mountains rising in front of them.
Coming in at over 200 miles per hour, TWA Flight 514 slammed into Mount Weather on the Loudoun-Clarke County line at 11:09 a.m., cutting a 60-yard wide swath through the treetops before plowing into a rocky outcropping on the east side of Route 601.
The aircraft was disintegrated by the unimaginable force of the impact, instantly killing all 92 people on board. Debris and bloody human remains were scattered in the heavy woodland on the eastern slope of the mountain across an area the size of two football fields.
While controllers at Dulles tried to reach TWA 514 on the radio, a man living on Rt. 601 went out in the snow to see why the power to his home had gone out. Seeing fire where the plane went down, he called the fire control in Leesburg and was told that it was suspected to be a plane crash.
By noon, Virginia State Police had blocked Route 7 at Snicker’s Gap, and area fire and rescue companies responded to the crash site. Local hospitals were notified of possible mass casualties.
Among the first Fauquier County units to arrive was the Marshall Volunteer Rescue Company.
“We got the call at about 12:10 p.m. that there was an aircraft down on the mountain,” said MVRS member Pete Van Deman in an interview published in The Fauquier Democrat newspaper on Dec. 5, 1974. They were issued rain gear, flashlights and other equipment and headed out. “About halfway there we learned that it was a 727.”
The Marshall unit arrived at the scene at about 12:30 p.m.
“There was a lot of wreckage,” said Van Deman. “It was a mess – with rain, sleet, snow and zephyr-like wind. The cloud cover was heavy and the few fire spots on the road caused a lot of smoke. It was hard to see. The first thing we did was look for survivors.”
But it was quickly apparent that no one had survived.
“There was absolutely nothing rescue people could do,” he added. “Loudoun County was in charge. We were released, waiting for the National Transportation Safety Board officials to arrive.”
The late Brett Philips, then the managing editor of the Loudoun Times-Mirror, was an early arrival on the scene.
“The grim spectacle that unfolded on the Blue Ridge Sunday seemed to have only one consistency—an aura so macabre that it approached the unreal,” he wrote. “Dense fog, driving rain and a wind that refused to stop howling over its victims provided a backdrop in which fire and rescue workers –- a great many of them volunteers – moved nearly without expression through the wreckage of the worst aircraft accident in the history of Virginia.
“Searchers who groped into the woods on the east side of 601 looked without any hope of survivors, and would periodically return to the roadway, shaking their heads, their faces ashen.”
“It looked like something out of a World War II movie,” recalled Loudoun Times-Mirror reporter John Emig in an article published in the Indianapolis News on Dec. 3, 1974. “The scene was eerie, with flashes and ear-splitting cracks of thunder as lightning struck nearby mountains.
“Through the storm, the rescuers picked up pieces of bodies, putting them in plastic bags to be taken to a makeshift morgue.”
Loudoun County Medical Examiner Dr. George T. “Tom” Hocker was driven to the scene by a sheriff’s deputy. On the way up the mountain they were told that there were no survivors, and that his medical services would not be needed. But as the county coroner, he was responsible for identifying the 92 victims of the crash.
Dr. Hocker was assisted in this grim task by the Disaster Squad of the FBI, which brought fingerprinting analysis and other forensic resources. Investigators also went through luggage and handbags found at the site to determine identities.
No members of the media were allowed to go up to the crash site, but Nick Arundel, the late Fauquier Democrat owner and publisher, had other ideas. He knocked on the back door of an ambulance, and when it opened, he hopped in and got a ride up for an eyewitness view.
The Bluemont Community Center, a former elementary school about four miles from the crash, was used as an emergency morgue. About 40 people worked there throughout Sunday night and all day Monday in an attempt to piece together the remains found in the wreck and identify the victims. According to Dr. Hocker, by Monday only about half of the bodies found were recognizable.
Also at the scene were Salvation Army volunteers and Loudoun and Fairfax County Red Cross workers, providing food and warm clothing for the people involved in the recovery. They also handled calls from the victims’ relatives, coordinating the descriptions of the clothing and physical appearance of the passengers with the workers at the emergency morgue.
The National Transportation board’s “Go Team” arrived on the scene and recovered the Cockpit Voice and Flight Data recorders, which would help establish what happened in the last minutes of the flight.
After the recoverable human remains were removed from the crash site, a clean-up of the area was conducted by TWA contractors. What was left of the airplane – 26 tons of titanium mixture – was sold to a scrap dealer, and a wire fence was put up to keep out souvenir hunters.
It was eventually determined that the horrific crash was avoidable, and the loss of life unbearable. Flaws in the system were shown, and changes had to be made.
Noting that the radar altimeters on airliners provided insufficient warning, the FAA ordered that all commercial airliners be equipped with ground proximity warning systems (GPWS) like those on military aircraft, and that air traffic controllers have a system in place to alert them when an approaching aircraft went below minimum safe altitudes.
To avoid confusion between controllers and pilots, a common lexicon of critical terms was created, and a nationwide system for pilots to report incidents – without fear of retaliation – was established.
