‘I’m human,’ the pilot said, ‘and I made a mistake.’ But somebody was going to have to pay

Part 4 of 5

Many of those with a connection to Eastern Air Lines Flight 212 — which crashed Sept. 11, 1974, on its way into Charlotte — hoped pilot Jim Daniels would never be allowed to fly another airplane.

And at first, he wasn’t.

After the National Transportation Safety Board determined that Daniels (one of just 10 survivors) and Captain James Reeves (among the 72 dead) had demonstrated “poor cockpit discipline” by engaging in idle chatter and disregarding the aircraft’s three altimeters, the Federal Aviation Administration revoked Daniels’ license to fly. He resigned himself to leading a life on the ground and started studying to become a chiropractor.

Those notions, however, didn’t stick: By the one-year anniversary of the crash, Daniels was working with a lawyer on an appeal to get his license reinstated.

In late 1975, an Atlanta judge upheld the FAA’s decision, but Daniels appealed again; and shortly after the second anniversary of the crash, the NTSB reduced the co-pilot’s punishment to a six-month suspension and ordered his license to be reinstated by the FAA in April 1977.

Flight 212 survivor Richard Arnold — who was as angry with Reeves and Daniels as anyone and made a special trip to that Atlanta courthouse in late 1975 just to hear Daniels’ explanation firsthand — was incredulous about the rulings.

“It’s a textbook example of distracted driving,” Arnold, now 81, said in an interview with The Charlotte Observer, adding that in the years after the crash he listened to the audio from the cockpit voice recorder multiple times during official court proceedings and heard “two old good ol’ boys talking, and not flying the plane.” (While a mostly complete transcript exists, the actual recording has never been made publicly available.)

Arnold has always been careful to note that although Daniels was at the controls of Flight 212, Reeves was the one in charge. But he has also always felt that the problem was much more systemic.

“I blame Eastern more than I blame him,” Arnold said. “... If Eastern Air Lines had been more careful in its pilot training and recertification, would it have not happened? We’ll never know — because it happened. That’s why we sued Eastern Airlines.”

And in the end, Arnold would help make the airline pay dearly for its tragic mistake.

A window into ‘poor cockpit discipline’

The events of 9/11/74 marked Eastern’s second major catastrophic event in less than two years that ultimately was deemed to have been caused by pilot error.

On Dec. 29, 1972, 101 of 176 people on board perished when the airline’s Flight 401 crashed into the Everglades. In the moments before it went down in the Florida wetlands, the pilots had become fixated on a landing gear indicator light and failed to realize that the autopilot function inadvertently had become disconnected, causing the plane to lose altitude. It would become the second-deadliest air crash in U.S. history to that point.

But the Flight 212 disaster was different, largely because of the amount of casual conversation between the pilots, some of which was of a racially charged nature.

According to the audio transcript from the cockpit voice recorder, at 7:26 a.m. — just over seven minutes before the crash — Reeves said:

“They’re going to come out with a new law and say, ‘Okay, now we’re gonna integrate the private schools, therefore, you white folks are going to have to take all these Blacks going to your white school.’”

At 7:29, Daniels (who was in control of the plane at the time, with Reeves in a supervisory role) said: “Arabs are taking over every ... thing,” with the word between “every” and “thing” redacted.

At 7:30, as they approached an altitude of 3,000 feet, Reeves told Daniels that he recently gave a car to his son and was planning to buy a new one.

They spent the next few minutes distracted by their attempts to visually identify a tower at the Carowinds amusement park amid the patchy fog. Then at 7:34, the DC-9 crashed into a field and burst into flames more than three miles short of the runway at Douglas Municipal Airport.

The transcript revealed that neither pilot was aware the plane was in danger of hitting the ground until about a second beforehand.

The record of the conversation was a bombshell from the NTSB’s hearings related to Eastern 212 in November 1974, as was Daniels’ inability to adequately explain why he and Reeves were flying so low so far out from the airport.

Post-crash examinations of both pilots indicated neither had alcohol or drugs in their systems. Instead — equally egregiously — they were just being careless. The NTSB would determine that the lax attitude permeating the cockpit as the plane descended led to a couple of particularly crucial errors.

‘I’m terribly sorry about the accident’

For one, Reeves and Daniels did not make some of the required “call-outs” (i.e., the verbal acknowledgments between crew members mandated to promote situational awareness) at 1,000 or 500 feet.

More critically, they ignored a terrain warning alert that sounded to indicate the aircraft was at an altitude of 1,000 feet. Like many pilots of the time, they had come to regard the signal as more of a nuisance than a caution, but in this case doing so exacerbated the problem.

At The Charlotte Observer’s request, several aviation experts studied the NTSB report and the journey of Eastern Flight 212. One was Greg Zahornacky, who flew DC-9s as part of his two decades as a commercial airline pilot and is now an assistant professor of aviation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

He said the DC-9 was “my favorite airplane to fly” because it was fast, versatile and handled “like a sports car.” But sports cars can also be mishandled by distracted drivers, and Zahornacky said that’s what happened here.

“There was just a lot of extraneous conversation going on on the flight deck,” he said. “That was the causation of this accident: situational awareness and distraction. You start looking at what we call ‘risk stacking,’ where you’re stacking up all these things against you.

“We had a weather issue. … Conversation issues — they were distracted. The fog was a problem. They were getting lower and seemed to be unaware of where they were. … It just seemed as though they were — I can’t say nonchalant. But they didn’t seemingly care as much as they perhaps should have (about) the things they should have been looking at.”

Bob Benzon — who worked for the NTSB for 27 years and was the lead investigator on about three dozen crashes, including the famed “Miracle On the Hudson” flight of 2009 — agreed that human error certainly was a factor in the Eastern crash. But Benzon also found fault in the 1974 NTSB report.

“It was pretty shallow. ‘Blame the pilots’ … . There had to be deeper things in there. How to handle the crews and so on. … Forty pages is pretty skinny for that large of an accident.”

Publicly, Daniels was remorseful, and though he pushed back a little, he also gave emotional testimony during his appeal proceedings in Atlanta in late 1975.

“I’m terribly sorry about the accident,” Daniels told the judge, his voice quavering. “I’d give anything in the world if it hadn’t happened. But I did my job. At no time was there any intent on my part to commit or violate any of the company operating procedures. … I think I misread the altimeter. …

“I’m human, and I made a mistake.”

To that end, in his 1977 book “Final Approach: The Crash of Eastern 212” — which bore a subtitle that referred to the tragedy as “an Avoidable Plane Disaster” — author William Stockton closed by describing Daniels as a man emotionally and physically broken. “When he can fly again,” the tome’s final sentence asked, “will he want to?”

But privately, Daniels felt unfairly vilified.

“I feel like he feels he was railroaded, because the pilot (Captain Reeves) wasn’t there” to help defend their actions, Daniels’ daughter Ruth Leifels said. “So it was their word against his, and he says the only reason he’s alive is because somebody dragged him out of the plane. Otherwise he would be dead, and then: ‘It wouldn’t have been an issue, because they could blame whomever.’”

In any case, his license was indeed reinstated in April 1977. Although he never flew for Eastern again, Daniels would fly countless more times over the course of a long and revitalized career, including as a pilot of private charters and cargo planes for companies such as UPS.

Daniels rarely talked about the crash with anyone.

Being a pilot, though, was clearly the proudest professional accomplishment of his life. After he died in 2021 at age 83, the first word in his obituary was: “Captain.”

What price would Eastern have to pay?

In the years that followed the crash, some 75 lawsuits filed by survivors and the families of victims were settled out of court by Eastern and its 19 insurance carriers for a total of about $22 million.

But Richard Arnold and fellow survivor Frank Mihalek were among a select few who fought for years and eventually went to trial.

Mihalek — the passenger who had entered the cockpit with flight attendant Colette Watson, as the plane burned, to find Captain Reeves’ dead body and to help drag Daniels to safety — endured months of skin grafts and physical therapy. On top of that, his initial recovery from the emotional trauma was impeded by a surprising turn of events.

“Almost immediately upon my father’s discharge from the hospital,” Darryl Mihalek said, remembering his late father, who died in 2012, “we began receiving telephone calls, letters and visits to the door from people we never knew. All sorts of reasons … macabre fascination, people wanting to touch my father or shake his hand (believing God had spared him for a reason). ...

“My father began experiencing PTSD, though it wasn’t called that at the time. He began to shrink away from everyday activities like driving, answering the phone or doorbell.”

Meanwhile, Arnold spent nearly 3½ months in the hospital after his near-death experience, finally sleeping in his own bed for the first time on Christmas Eve in 1974. But it was far from a return to normal. He walked with a limp and felt, in his words, like Quasimodo from “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” due to his disfigured hands and collection of scars.

During settlement negotiations, Arnold — who’d hired a team of attorneys led by Charlotte legend-in-the-making Bill Diehl — and Frank Mihalek, who had separate counsel, were offered $1.3 million and $250,000, respectively. Both men rejected the figures.

“There was a lot of outrage,” said Gary Hemric, then an attorney working alongside Diehl on Arnold’s behalf.

“Some witness said — may have been Richard, it may have been Mihalek — he said … ‘I wish I could hear what the pilots were talking about. I wish they’d pipe that into the passenger compartment of the airplane. ’Cause I would have gotten up and banged on the door and said, Pay the f--- attention to what you’re doing! I’m on the bus and you’re driving off the cliff! ’”

“This was not a difficult weather-affected landing,” Hemric added. “This was one you could do in your sleep. And that’s what they were doing — in their sleep.”

But neither survivor knew that their fights with Eastern would wind up lasting as long as they did.

After settlement talks failed, the airline dug in, and it took more than five years to go to trial, with Arnold’s and Mihalek’s suits eventually joined with one brought by Helen Weston of Charleston, whose husband, Lewis Weston, died in the crash.

Taking a defensive stance supported by company president Frank Borman, a former astronaut who commanded the first NASA mission to orbit the moon, the lawyers for Eastern and its insurance carriers tried to pin the blame on both the FAA and the four air-traffic controllers. They also argued that Arnold and Mihalek (who said he had still not been mentally capable of returning to work) were exaggerating their pain and suffering.

It was a massive affront to the survivors and the families of the dead.

So it became a huge one to Diehl, too. At the time, he was barely 30 and hadn’t yet become the city’s best-known divorce attorney. But he already had developed the ruthlessly flamboyant style he used to try to rip opposing attorneys and their clients to pieces. And during the trial in Charlotte in November 1979, an incensed Diehl made booming arguments.

“You imagine being fried in Eastern Air Lines’ kerosene and how that feels,” he roared, referring to Arnold: “He fought and kicked and got out of the plane. ... It’s a miracle that he got out of the plane. They would rather him not have gotten out of the plane. It would be so much easier, but he got out of the plane, and he got out of the plane after being subjected to something that I can’t conceive, watching other people waving their hands as they burned to death.”

Following a bitter, ugly two-week trial and two days of deliberations, a federal jury decided that Eastern and the insurance carriers should pay Arnold $3,027,500 and Mihalek $1,137,500.

Eastern disagreed, and appealed. The last case involving victims of Flight 212 would drag into the 1980s.

And then Flight 212 faded into history…

The fallout from the Flight 212 disaster did lead to real, significant change: In 1981, the FAA introduced what’s called the “sterile cockpit” rule, which prohibited pilots from engaging in conversations unrelated to the operation of the aircraft when flying below 10,000 feet.

Captain Reeves and First Officer Daniels’ fateful small talk is commonly believed to be among the main reasons the rule — which still stands today — was instituted.

Explained Anthony Brickhouse, an aviation expert who worked for the NTSB and is now an associate professor at Embry-Riddle: “When that rule first came out, it was for landings. And then it eventually got expanded to takeoffs. So: Below 10,000 feet, we’re not talking about the Super Bowl. We’re not talking about the Daytona 500. We’re not talking about the Charlotte Hornets. We’re only talking about pertinent information related to what’s going on on the flight deck.”

Meanwhile, in June of 1982, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the millions in awards for Arnold and Mihalek. Helen Weston, the widowed third plaintiff, wound up with a $797,000 judgment.

But it still wasn’t over. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in April 1983 let stand without comment the ruling that cleared the air traffic controllers and the federal government from liability. Eastern and its insurance companies finally had to pay, ending the Flight 212 families’ years-long battles. (Arnold, who had relocated to Portland, Ore., took an annuity option that would pay him $50,000 in Year One, with the amount increasing at a rate of 5% annually for the rest of his life. Today, at age 81, the check he receives each year is well into the six figures.)

As the 10-year anniversary of the crash came and went, however, Charlotte’s collective memory of the disaster was fading fast.

In the mid-1980s, a neighborhood built on the ground where the DC-9’s carcass had come to rest became populated by people for whom Flight 212 was either a foggy memory or a story they’d never known at all. It certainly wasn’t advertised to them when they moved in.

Frank Borman resigned as head of Eastern in 1986, when the troubled airline was sold, and in 1989, the once-mighty airline barely survived a massive employee strike. In January 1991, after a bout with bankruptcy, the airline ceased operations.

The following year, Ernie Abernethy — a resident of the then-new Olde Whitehall subdivision covering the crash site — was cutting a garden path with a neighbor when they had the rare experience of finding pieces of metal containing airplane rivets. (Most of the wreckage had been hauled off either by the NTSB or a salvage company; the rest was buried deep underground by then-landowner John McDowell.)

Abernethy was able to connect his backyard discovery to a vague recollection of the tragedy, which had happened when he was off in Chapel Hill, studying at UNC. But after considering the debris for a short time, he and his neighbor set it aside, continued working on their project, and eventually forgot about it. Like most everyone else.

Then in 1994, a couple of months shy of the 20th anniversary of the crash of Flight 212, USAir Flight 1016 flew into a severe storm cell and slammed into trees and a private residence on what is now Charlotte Douglas International Airport property. Thirty-seven people were killed and 20 survived with injuries.

“In loving memory,” reads a prominent memorial at the new Charlotte Douglas International Airport Overlook park, “of all those who died or were injured and those who helped in the rescue and restoration of USAir #1016 | July 2, 1994.”

But in the area of southwest Charlotte where Eastern’s DC-9 went down in 1974, there is no memorial at all. No marker. No attempt whatsoever to honor the victims or the survivors or the first responders.

Which, to some, begs the question: Why not?

Part 5 | The Forgotten

Fifty years later, why do so few people in Charlotte remember that this tragedy ever happened? Also: A famous late-night-show host remains haunted by Flight 212.

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 free events at 11:30 a.m. and at 7:00 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, panel discussions about the series will feature plane crash survivors, family members, reporters Scott Fowler and Théoden Janes, and others. Tickets are free, but RSVPs are required. Details here .

Additional Credits

Sohail Al-Jamea | Graphics

Rachel Handley | Illustrations & Design

David Newcomb | Development & Design