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Fourteen Seconds: How a Small Plane Sheared a DC‑9's Tail
Fourteen Seconds: How a Small Plane Sheared a DC‑9's Tail
Fear of sudden, catastrophic collision: a DC‑9 lost its entire tail assembly and eighty‑three people died in fourteen seconds after a small Piper Cherokee and a commercial airliner occupied the same cubic feet of sky. The Cherokee left no usable transponder signal, controllers saw a clear sky, and the tail was found intact 300 feet from the rest of the aircraft - so what chain of assumptions allowed two planes to collide unseen?
In this episode, we recount the sequence of events on that afternoon and describe who was where, what…
The skinny
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