It should have been an easy flight to Charlotte. But then something went horribly wrong.

Part 1 of 5

As the DC-9 made what he assumed was its final approach to a runway at Charlotte’s airport, Richard Arnold peered out his airplane window and saw one wide-eyed face staring back up at him, then another.

The first person seemed frantic. The second seemed stupefied.

Seconds later, two other passengers — Bob Burnham and Scott Johnson, in window seats on the same side but farther back — both caught a glimpse of something that would make anyone incredulous: the wing of the plane slicing underneath the branches of several trees.

They barely had time to process what they were seeing. All they knew at that moment was, There’s something wrong here . And in the next, their airplane was smashed apart, and most of the assorted random strangers they had been traveling with — on what was supposed to be just a short hop from Charleston, S.C., to Charlotte — were suffering brutal, violent deaths.

When all was said and done, the Eastern Air Lines Flight 212 disaster killed 72 of the 82 souls on board after the jet missed its intended landing zone by more than three miles, slamming into a large clearing on the edge of a forest, skidding through a cornfield, barreling into a cluster of trees, and turning into an inferno.

Today, some woods remain near the crash site, but both the impact point and Flight 212’s final resting place are surrounded by subdivisions full of residents largely oblivious to the horrors of that late-summer day.

There’s no marker acknowledging the Sept. 11, 1974 tragedy that happened long before Americans shivered at the mention of the words “September 11th.” No memorial. No real collective memory of it at all in Charlotte.

If the subject does come up, it’s often in conversations not among Charlotteans, but rather among aviation geeks who know that 212’s deadly fate wound up saving lives — because it helped give way to a strict rule relating to cockpit conversations. Or, it’s occasionally referred to when someone brings up the fact that Stephen Colbert’s father and two of his brothers perished in a plane crash, because yes, Flight 212 is the one that haunts the late-night talk-show host to this day.

Otherwise, it’s been largely forgotten except by the surviving family members of the victims and the handful of people who saw the carnage and are still alive to talk about it five decades later — including the last three living survivors of the 1974 crash.

But to this day, 50 years later, they still express shock and even infuriation when they think about what the pilots were doing right before it went down.

Climbing aboard the doomed flight

Ten-year-old Martha Thornhill woke up that morning while it was still dark outside to give her beloved big brother Ned the last hug she’d ever wrap around him.

The siblings had spent the summer aquaplaning and waterskiing off the back of their parents’ boat along Wadmalaw Island in the Charleston area. Now fall was about to begin and the fun was over; Ned was due at boarding school in Virginia, and he’d get there by flying on an airplane for the first time, by himself, an exciting proposition for an adventurous boy of 14.

A few days earlier, their father decided that he didn’t need to accompany Ned on the trip. But the co-owner of Charleston Oil Company had something of a proxy lined up in his friend Frank Ford, who was also booked on the flight to Charlotte and ate breakfast with Ned and his father at the Charleston airport beforehand.

Very few people knew Frank was getting onto that plane. Colleagues at the family business he presided over in the Charleston area, Ford’s Redi-Mix Concrete, were aware the happily married 44-year-old father of three was headed to Charlotte that morning to attend a meeting, but they thought he was making the 200-mile trek by car. They had no idea his secretary had purchased the Eastern Air Lines ticket for Frank the night before, at his request.

Of course, in 1974, buying plane tickets at the last minute wasn’t at all uncommon. Travelers routinely would bring a suitcase to the airport — without yet having a ticket — and purchase a seat practically minutes before boarding.

John Toohey, for instance, bought his airfare at the Charleston airport on the morning of the 11th so he could get to Connecticut for the funeral of his father, who’d just died of cancer at only 53. Walter Seal, a local-news anchor in Charleston who John Toohey saw on TV every day, was at the counter purchasing his fare for the same flight at the same time.

As the sun prepared to make its appearance over Charleston’s horizon, Eastern 212’s 78 passengers began straggling out onto the tarmac and up the boarding stairs onto the plane.

Scott Johnson waited to board until near the very end after spotting Rear Admiral Charles Cummings at the gate with a small entourage of naval aides. A 20-year-old petty officer third class who was trying to get home to Vermont during a brief leave, Johnson hadn’t wanted anything to do with that group, in the same way you might not want to see your boss when you were about to go on vacation.

By the time he finally stepped onto the plane, it was full, and he had to sit in a window seat at the very back, in the smoking section.

Thick cigarette smoke in cabins is one of the most dramatic differences between flying in the ’70s and flying now. But air travel was a much more dignified experience, too — better food, larger and more-comfortable seats — and people treated it that way. Almost everyone dressed up when they were getting on a plane. Flying still felt special. At the same time, just like there is today, there was some anxiety associated with the prospect of being thousands of feet in the air inside a big metal tube.

But for Eastern 212’s Atlanta-based crew of Captain James Reeves, First Officer Jim Daniels, and flight attendants Colette Watson and Eugenia Kerth, it was just another day at their office in the sky.

And at 7 a.m., when the DC-9 lifted off the runway to start its path up to Charlotte, there was every reason to believe that the flight was going to be completely routine.

Only 34 minutes later, however, the plane was in pieces — and on fire.

A troubling time to take to the air

In the 1970s, Eastern was one of the biggest airlines in the U.S. But it was a turbulent time for the industry, and 1974 already had endured a number of significant plane crashes.

By far the worst was the one involving Turkish Airlines Flight 981. A faulty cargo door caused the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 to crash into a forest shortly after takeoff from Paris, killing all 335 passengers and the 11 crew members on board and making it the deadliest accident in aviation history to that point — by more than double.

And on Sept. 8, just three days before Eastern Air Lines 212 went down, TWA Flight 841 from Athens to Rome plunged into the Ionian Sea, killing 79 passengers and nine crew members. A bomb had been detonated in the cargo hold, in an era when airline travel was particularly fraught with the threat of terrorism: 1973 saw the dawn of the screening of passengers and their carry-on baggage via metal detectors and X-ray machines, and in 1974 Congress made convicted aircraft pirates subject to the death penalty.

The crash of Eastern 212, meanwhile, would be an anomaly. Because it wasn’t precipitated by terrorism, or weather, or a mechanical or maintenance issue.

Its root cause, however, would prove just as unsettling.

The ground was closing in — fast

Richard Arnold was having trouble sleeping that morning.

Thirty-one and a systems engineer for IBM at the time, he was recently separated from his soon-to-be-ex-wife — who’d moved a couple of months earlier to Florida with their young sons Christopher and Chandler — and he woke up before 4 a.m. feeling as he had often felt since then: incredibly lonesome.

After starting a pot of coffee, Arnold got dressed in a beige double-knit suit that was one of his least-favorite but on this day also one of his least-rumpled.

He was at the airport earlier than most, by about 5 a.m., ready to head to Washington, D.C., to set up a computer system for a client. When it was time to board, he filed onto the airplane and grabbed the window seat on the right side just beyond the first-class cabin, to take advantage of the few extra inches of legroom in front of the partition.

After one of the flight attendants brought Arnold a cup of coffee, the DC-9 took off and climbed into the sky above Charleston. He pulled out a copy of U.S. News & World Report — which he flipped through but found nothing of interest. So he just gazed out of the window, and before long was thinking about how much he missed his sons again.

Upon the plane entering Charlotte airspace, Arnold saw clouds above, and some clouds below, but as it banked he briefly had a crystal-clear line of sight to the airport off in the distance.

As the aircraft descended, it dropped through a bank of clouds and Arnold looked down to see the ground closing in fast. Perhaps a bit too fast , he thought. When they passed over a parking lot next to a factory and he saw a man wildly waving his arms up at them, the plane was less than 250 feet in the air. Arnold waved back.

Several seconds later, they were maybe at only 150 feet, and Arnold saw a pickup truck that looked like it had run off the road; as they whizzed over it, the driver craned his head out the vehicle’s window. In that moment, he thought, Ah, OK, that’s a frontage road on the perimeter of the airport, and we’re about to touch down on the runway.

In the next, however, he realized the plane was instead going to hit the trees.

Lives left up to musical chairs

Fate would twist and bend and break in other directions that would wind up saving some lives and extinguishing others.

A few days before Sept. 11, 1974, brothers John and Louie Pinheiro bought tickets to fly home to Boston while on a leave from the Navy.

The Pinheiros — whose parents had brought them to America from West Africa in 1960 — had been serving together on the aging USS Yellowstone out of its home port in Charleston. They knew when they made their travel plans that the Navy had scheduled the decommissioning of the Yellowstone for September 11th. They also knew that they had an obligation to stand duty during the ceremony.

There was a loophole, though: For $25, they could pay another enlisted man to stand in for them, excusing their absence. So that’s what they had planned to do.

John, the older at 20, was particularly excited to get back to New England, where he had a beautiful new wife who he’d been living almost a thousand miles away from since their wedding just a few months earlier.

But the day before the flight, Louie changed his mind. He didn’t want to spend the cash after all, $25 being equal to roughly three days’ pay. “I think I’m just gonna do the ceremony,” he told John. “I’ll catch a later flight. I’ll still be home on the same day.” His brother went ahead with the original plan, and would perish in the crash.

Another passenger — Bill Shelley, then the director of pathology at Charlotte Memorial Hospital — was trying to fly standby on the 7 a.m. flight so he could get home from a work trip to his wife and three kids a few hours earlier. He got bumped up into a seat on Flight 212 shortly before takeoff. Shelley would survive the crash, but suffered horrific injuries that he would succumb to a month later.

Also on board were best friends Charles Weaver and Harry Grady, who worked together as supervisors at Amstar Corporation (now Domino Foods) and were on their way to meet with suppliers in Philadelphia. Weaver initially sat in the middle seat, while Grady took the aisle next to him; but just prior to departure, Weaver got up to find a cup of coffee, and when he returned, Grady had moved over.

“Go ahead and sit on the aisle, I’ll take the middle,” Grady said.

Less than an hour later, only Weaver would still be alive.

A pair of pilots making a puddle jump

The plane’s captain, 48-year-old James Reeves, was a seasoned veteran.

He’d been employed by Eastern for more than 18 years, and had logged nearly 9,000 hours in charge of the cockpit, including almost 4,000 in a DC-9. Earlier in the year, he passed checks with very good and excellent ratings. Reeves was well-rested, and still near the beginning of his workday.

His first officer, Jim Daniels, 36, was roughly half as experienced, but that still meant he had thousands of flying hours under his belt.

The two pilots and their crew already had made one flight that morning, to get from Atlanta to Charleston, on an otherwise-empty plane.

For the flight up to Charlotte, Daniels was at the helm.

Other than some patchy fog and low-lying clouds — which were expected to create minor visibility issues in the final few minutes before landing — there was zero wind and this was on track to be a relatively routine puddle jump.

As they neared the city, Reeves said over the radio: “Charlotte approach. Eastern 212, descending to four (i.e. an altitude of 4,000 feet).”

The controller replied, “Eastern 212 ... descend and maintain 3,000.”

“All right,” Reeves radioed back, “on down to three.”

Reeves and Daniels had been in this position hundreds of times. As they continued down into Charlotte, they were about as relaxed as they could possibly be.

That September, the country also was still reeling from the stunning turn of events of August 1974 — when Richard Nixon became the first U.S. president to resign, due to his involvement in the Watergate scandal, with Gerald Ford inaugurated the next day as the 38th commander-in-chief.

“Old Ford’s,” Reeves started to say, “beginning to take some of his hard knocks…”

‘We should be landing right on time’

Colette Watson, the chief flight attendant, announced over the intercom that they would be landing soon. It was time, she advised, to put out cigarettes, stow tray tables, bring seats forward, make sure seatbelts are fastened — that kind of thing.

She then made another trip down the aisle, past the sweet old couple that had smiled at her every time she went by. They smiled at her again. Watson knew the pilots would be putting the landing gear down soon, so she briefly hesitated when a teenage boy stopped her and politely asked if he could have a cup of hot chocolate. But, thinking he looked “precious,” she hurried to fulfill the request as the DC-9 descended toward the low-lying clouds.

Meanwhile, Charles Weaver looked at his wrist, then leaned over to his friend Harry Grady.

“We should be landing right on time,” he said, tapping his watch face, pleased that they’d be able to sit and have breakfast before their connecting flight.

Two tones chimed inside the cabin. The sound of the engines changed as Eastern 212 started to reduce speed. Those in window seats with a view of either wing could see flaps being deployed for landing. The plane kept dropping, briefly disappearing into the low clouds as the jet sailed past Carowinds amusement park on the North Carolina-South Carolina state line.

Watson delivered the hot chocolate to her young passenger and then hustled to get to her jump seat near the cockpit door. To the rear of the plane, the other flight attendant — 25-year-old Eugenia Kerth, a married former homecoming queen born in Argentina and raised in Atlanta — buckled herself into hers.

When the plane came through the low cloud bank, John Toohey, the man headed to Connecticut for his father’s funeral, was surprised by how close the bottom of the plane was getting to the tops of the trees. He wasn’t immediately concerned, though, because he was used to coming into Charleston over the woods that were right by the airport.

But it kept swooping lower to the ground, and at 7:33 a.m., the DC-9 roared at treetop level over a school bus ferrying kids along Highway 49.

Moments later, Scott Johnson — the young man trying to get home to Vermont during a Navy leave — saw the tip of a pine tree fly right past the end of the plane’s right wing. That’s either one tall tree , he thought to himself, or we’re right above the ground . In a matter of seconds, every passenger looking out the windows went from confused to alarmed to panicked at what they saw next: the branches of trees directly outside, first at eye level, then, horrifyingly, rising above them.

They did not see a runway.

Fifty full years later, Bob Burnham — then a naval officer who was heading to Washington, D.C., to interview for a civilian job — still remembers the feeling that overcame him at 7:34 a.m. on Wednesday, September 11th, 1974.

“It’s not like I yelled to everybody or anything like that,” recalled Burnham, now 75 and living in Hilton Head, South Carolina.

“I just sort of froze — and the plane exploded as soon as it hit.”

Coming Thursday

Part 2 | The Crash: Dozens of passengers died on impact. The rest faced another deadly threat: “Dante’s Inferno.”

How we reported this story

The Charlotte Observer series “9/11/74,” detailing the plane crash of Eastern Flight 212 in Charlotte and its aftermath, was reported and written by Scott Fowler and Théoden Janes.

Current photographs are by visual journalist Jeff Siner, while historical photographs mostly come from former Charlotte Observer photographer Don Sturkey. Videos are by Siner and Diamond Vences. Gavin Off contributed research. Taylor Batten and The' Pham were the series editors. This series is based primarily on dozens of new interviews conducted by The Observer with all the remaining survivors and their families, families of victims, crash investigators, aviation experts and first responders.

A trove of recently discovered and previously unreported transcribed interviews with the plane crash survivors — conducted by the National Transportation Safety Board in 1974 only a few days after the incident — was also relied upon for verification. In those interviews, survivors recounted in detail what they were thinking during the crash and its aftermath.

Janes and Fowler also pored over thousands of documents related to the crash; found additional material through library visits, the 1977 book “Final Approach” and FOIA requests; and visited Charlotte’s Sullenberger Aviation Museum and the crash site.

On Wednesday, Sept. 18, The Charlotte Observer will host a free event from 7-9 p.m. at Charlotte’s Independent Picture House that will include a screening of “9/11/74,” The Observer’s 30-minute documentary about the crash of Eastern Flight 212. Following the screening, a panel discussion about the series will feature plane crash survivors, family members and reporters Scott Fowler and Théoden Janes. Tickets are free, but RSVPs are required. Details here .

Additional Credits

Sohail Al-Jamea | Graphics

Rachel Handley | Illustrations & Design

David Newcomb | Development & Design