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The Ring That Survived: Mike Todd's Overloaded Flight to Nowhere
The Ring That Survived: Mike Todd's Overloaded Flight to Nowhere
A single wedding ring returned intact while a twin-engine Lockheed Lodestar exploded and scattered four men across a desert hillside near Grants, New Mexico. The flight carried extra fuel tanks that pushed the aircraft above its maximum gross weight, ice formed at altitude, and one engine failed - so how did small decisions before takeoff turn a routine trip into a fatal crash?
In this episode, we tell the sequence of events on March 22, 1958, from Mike Todd’s last-minute calls and the plane’s known overload to the…
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