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When Two Planes Vanished From Each Other: Cerritos Collision, 1986
When Two Planes Vanished From Each Other: Cerritos Collision, 1986
Eighty-two people died in thirty seconds over Cerritos, California on August 31, 1986, when a DC-9 named Hermosillo and a Piper Archer collided in clear blue sky - neither pilot ever saw the other. What failures in rules and airspace control allowed a commercial jet and a small private plane to occupy the same six-thousand-foot corridor with no time to react?
In this episode, we tell the sequence of events that led to the midair collision and its human consequences, laying out who was aboard, where each aircraft came from, and…
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