Crash Site of Military Air Transport Service (MATS) Douglas C-118A Liftmaster February 1, 1958 (Norwalk, California)

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At Long Beach Municipal Airport, 35 members of various branches of the U.S. military, including five women, boarded a Military Air Transport Service (MATS) Douglas C-118A Liftmaster (53-3277A), joining its five-man crew and a female stewardess for a flight to McGuire Air Force Base near Wrightstown, New Jersey. The plane, a military derivative of the four-engine Douglas DC-6A airliner, took off from Long Beach at 7:08 p.m.

One minute earlier, at nearby Los Alamitos Naval Air Station to the southeast, eight U.S. Navy reservists assigned to a twin-engine Lockheed P2V-5F Neptune patrol bomber (127723) took off on a routine weekend training flight.

Less than five minutes after both planes were airborne, and while operating under visual flight rules (VFR) as they climbed into the nighttime sky, they collided in midair over the city of Norwalk.

The MATS C-118A Liftmaster, trailing flame and smoke, fell in several pieces, with the tail section of the transport slamming through the roof of a service station at the intersection of Firestone and Pioneer Boulevards in Norwalk. Another main portion of the flaming transport plummeted to the ground across the street and exploded in the parking lot of the Norwalk sheriff’s station, igniting an underground gasoline storage tank, demolishing a maintenance garage, and crushing or damaging a number of parked squad cars and civilian automobiles. All 35 passengers and six crew members aboard the C-118A perished in the fiery impact.

The crippled Lockheed P2V-5F Neptune, meanwhile, angled northward and crashed into an excavated clay pit on Norwalk Boulevard directly across the street from a Los Angeles County fire station in the city of Santa Fe Springs. Three of the eight reservists aboard the Neptune survived the impact but one died en route to a local hospital. Of the two remaining survivors, one was critically injured and the other, Leslie Van Dyke, 23, miraculously walked away from the crash with a twisted ankle, facial and hip bruises, and a cut on his leg.

Yet another victim of the disaster was a Norwalk housewife, 25-year-old Edith Hernandez, who was cut in half by a falling fragment from one of the planes as she ran from her house on Jersey Avenue upon hearing the aerial collision overhead.

The catastrophe was witnessed by numerous motorists on the nearby Santa Ana Freeway (Interstate 5) as well as by dozens of area residents, many of whom were outdoors on the mild evening attempting to catch a glimpse of America’s first satellite, “Explorer 1,” which was scheduled to pass over the region at about the same time.

Pilot error was believed to be the cause of the collision, with both aircraft crews failing to exercise proper “see and avoid” procedures regarding other aircraft in the vicinity of their own while operating under visual flight rules.

Fatalities: 48 -- All 35 passengers and 6 crew aboard the Douglas C-118A Liftmaster; 6 of 8 Navy reservists aboard the Lockheed P2V-5F Neptune, and 1 person on the ground.

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