FOR YEARS, Evan Cotter Jr. had nightmares about December 8, 1972. That afternoon a United Airlines jet attempting to land at Midway Airport crashed into his bungalow-lined neighborhood of West Lawn, obliterating a stretch of it. Two people on the ground and 43 aboard the Boeing 737 were killed. Cotter, 13 at the time, was home when one of the wings smashed into his house. “There was rubble everywhere. It looked like a war zone,” recalls Cotter, who still lives on the block. “It was like you were on a movie set, but it was really happening.”
This is the story of how one of Chicago’s most shocking disasters unfolded on a gray and wintery day 50 years ago this month, told in the words of those who experienced it. Based largely on newspaper and TV interviews from just hours and days after the crash, this account also includes new ones Chicago conducted with Cotter, flight attendant Jean Griffin, passenger Jennifer Sherwood, and neighborhood resident Mary Morrissey.
I IN THE AIR
As United Flight 553 approached Chicago, fog, drizzle, and light snow had cut visibility to about a mile. The aircraft had taken off from Washington National Airport at 12:50 p.m. Central time, with Omaha, Nebraska, as its ultimate destination. It was scheduled for a 2:31 landing at Midway.
With 61 aboard — 55 passengers and a crew of three pilots and three flight attendants — the 94-seat plane was about three-fifths full. Among the passengers: George W. Collins, 47, a U.S. representative from Chicago who was returning home to help organize a Christmas party for kids; Michele Clark, 29, a newly minted CBS News national correspondent who grew up in Chicago and was coming back to visit her parents; and Dorothy Hunt, 52, the wife of Watergate ringleader E. Howard Hunt, who was facing trial the following month.
At 2:19, Flight 553 — then above Gary, Indiana, roughly 25 miles southeast of the airport — was cleared to descend to 4,000 feet and directed to Midway’s runway 31L. The captain, Wendell Whitehouse, a 16-year United veteran, soon got on the intercom to address his passengers.
Marvin Anderson, a 43-year-old assistant research director at the Illinois Institute of Technology, was one of them.
Anderson: The last words the pilot said to us were, “We are at 4,000 feet and everything is going well.”
But then a warning light came on in the cockpit. The flight data recorder had stopped working. “See what’s wrong with it, will ya?” Whitehouse told his second officer, Barry J. Elder. (The cockpit audio recorder was still functioning.)
As Flight 553 drew closer to Midway, a small twin-prop aircraft was making another attempt at landing on runway 31L, having missed its first approach. To put more distance between the two planes, air traffic control asked the 737 to decrease its speed. The tower then cleared it to descend farther, but the cockpit crew was still trying to figure out what had gone wrong with the black box. Elder groused, “Christ, I can’t even find the circuit breaker for this.” He finally did and called in the problem. Only then, 35 seconds after the clearance, did the plane begin its second descent.
At 2:26,
