December 5, 2025 • 35 mins
In the early hours of Tuesday 15th May 1979, 23-year-old David Booth awoke from a terrible dream, sweating profusely with tears in his eyes. In it, he watched as a silver American Airlines plane fell from the sky and crashed right in front of him.
Then he had the dream again. And again.
Soon he began to wonder, what if it wasn't just a dream?
Written by Richard MacLean Smith
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
It was late March nineteen seventy nine, and an unseasonably
warm day was settling in over Tulsa, Oklahoma. Down at
the main hangar of the American Airlines Maintenance Facility just
east of Tulsa Airport, mechanics and coveralls mingled with engineers
in crisp shirts and ties under bright fluorescent light, serenaded
(00:22):
by an endless wiz of drills and the thrum of
heavy machinery. The facility was then and still is the
world's largest commercial airlines base. Back in nineteen seventy nine,
it employed around six thousand people, servicing as many as
ten to fifteen aircraft at any one time. One of
(00:44):
them on that day in late March was a sparkling
aluminium paneled McDonnell Douglas DC ten registration number N one
one zero AA. The model was notable for its its
distinctive trijet design, with an engine on each wing and
(01:04):
one in the tail. This particular aircraft was seven years
old and had flown thousands of hours since its first
delivery in nineteen seventy two. It carried movie stars, people
on business families jetting off on vacation, but now it
was just another machine undergoing a routine maintenance check, including
(01:27):
an inspection of the engines. McDonnell Douglas had an official
procedure for this. It involved first removing the engine and
then the pylon, a curved strip of metal that held
the engine to the wing. It was a complex, meticulous job,
and one that also involved having to disconnect seventy nine
(01:48):
different cable systems, including hydraulic lines, fuel lines, and various
electric facilities. This was not only fiddly but also time consuming,
so engineers at American Airlines found a quicker way, a
more practical, cheaper way. Instead of taking the engine and
(02:08):
pylon apart separately, piece by piece, with the aid of
an overhead crane, they removed both sections in one go
as one single piece, using a regular forklift truck for support.
This way, they only had to disconnect twenty seven systems
instead of seventy nine, saving two hundred working hours every
(02:31):
time a plane underwent maintenance. And so it was that,
in the early hours of the midnight shift in the
hangar of that American Airlines maintenance facility in late March
nineteen seventy nine, the thirty first to be precise, the
same process was applied to plane N one one zero AA.
(03:00):
Forklift truck was brought forward and the platform attached to
its forks, was carefully positioned into place under plane N
one one zero AA's left engine. With the fork secured,
the mechanics got to work removing the engine along with
its supporting pylon. A few hours later, the midnight shift
(03:20):
came to an end, but the engine removal had not
yet been completed, so the forklift truck was simply left
in place, propping up the engine and the wing. The
truck's engine was then turned off and the midnight crew
clocked off for the day. Perhaps had someone been there,
they might have heard the faint hiss of pressure escaping
(03:43):
from the truck's hydraulics as its engine powered down, or
heard the pylon creek and shift ever so slightly out
of place as the truck's forks holding the plane's engine
in place slowly began to ease ever so slightly down,
Or perhaps it would have been imperceptible under the din
(04:04):
of all the rest of the noise in the hangar.
Either way, when the next crew arrived shortly after to
finish the task, they were surprised to find the pylon
a little out of line, but after a little bit
of jiggling with the fork lift, they soon managed to
ease it back into place and remove it accordingly. Later,
(04:25):
with the maintenance check complete, the tech crew finished up,
logged their time and headed home. By the afternoon of
March thirty, first d C ten N one one o
A A stood ready once more, its engines reattached, its
paperwork stamped and signed, but somewhere deep in the metal
(04:49):
of the aircraft's left pylon, unbeknownst to any one, a
near invisible, undetectable fracture was just beginning to appear. You're
listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard mc lean smith. David
(05:12):
Booth stood looking out over a strange, silent landscape. Ahead
of him was a large, nondescript field, a tree line
going down it, and a gravel path that curved around
from in front to behind him, leading onto a main road.
To his side was a dull, single story building. Distracted
(05:35):
by movement above, he looked up to see the shining
fuselage of a silver American Airlines jet arching through the sky.
It was strange, he thought to himself, how despite it
being so close the plane seemed to be flying completely silently,
with no sound coming from its engines. As it drew
(05:57):
ever closer, it began to bang oddly to the right.
More and more it turned until its left wing was
pointing upwards perpendicular to the ground. Then steadily it began
to fall. David watched on in utter horror as the plane,
now seemingly flying in slow motion, continued to fall, still
(06:21):
turning as it went. Then it plunged nose first straight
into the earth, exploding with a sickening roar in a
huge fireball of red and orange, followed by a billowing
plume of thick gray smoke. David shot up in his bed,
sweating profusely, struggling to catch his breath as tears streamed
(06:45):
down his eyes. Under the pale moonlight, he looked out
at his baby, Justin, sleeping soundly in his crib, then
turned to see his wife, Pam, lying fast asleep beside him.
He was at home, in his bed in Hyde Park, Cincinnati.
It was just a dream, he said to himself. It
(07:06):
was just a dream, And yet the dream and the
overwhelming sense of sadness that was now washing over him
was like nothing he'd ever experienced before. David spent the
rest of the night lying in bed, staring at the ceiling,
unable to shake the image of that plane smashing into
(07:26):
the ground as vivid then in his mind as it
was when he was dreaming it. When morning finally came,
he didn't have the words to explain it to Pam,
so he just washed and shaved, same as he always did,
and drove off to work. It was Tuesday, May fifteenth,
(07:46):
nineteen seventy nine. The following night, David Booth had the
dream again, the same dull building to his left, the
same American Airlines plane arching silently, horrifyingly through the sky,
(08:08):
its wings turning until it was almost upside down, before
slamming into the ground in a devastating ball of fire.
And once again David woke with tears streaming from his eyes,
crippled by a profound sense of sorrow. Then it happened
again the next night, and the next, and the next.
(08:32):
By Tuesday, twenty second of May, David had had the
same dream for seven nights in a row. Whenever he
remembered it the next day, it wasn't in that hazy,
fragmentary way that you try to fix a dream in
your mind. It was like a crisply embedded memory of
what he'd experienced the day before. Twenty three year old
(08:56):
David Booth, an office manager at the agency rent a
Car Reading, was a bright man with a long, patrician
face and plaintive, thoughtful eyes. He liked to play the
guitar and listen to Emmy Lou Harris, and had a
ponchant for self help books. What he didn't have any
time for was spooky stuff or any of that occult nonsense.
(09:20):
But this strange, incessant, terrifying dream was tearing him apart.
It even left him too scared to sleep come the evening.
He tried to keep himself awake as long as possible,
sitting alone in the darkness long after his wife Pam
had gone to bed, watching the Tonight Show, then the
(09:41):
Tomorrow Show, and even the test cards that came after.
But gradually his eyelids would begin to droop, and before
he knew it, he was back in that strange, eerie
field again, watching hell fall from the sky. Slowly, over time,
he began to wonder what if it wasn't just a dream.
(10:06):
On that Tuesday, May twenty second, Booth arrived at his
work with one thing on his mind. He didn't know
what he would say exactly, but he had to tell
someone what he was going through. If nothing else, he reasoned,
maybe by sharing his terrifying experience, he might bring it
to an end. He found a number for the Cincinnati
(10:27):
office of the Federal Aviation Administration and gave them a call. Eventually,
he was put through to Ray Pinkerton, assistant manager of
the Airway Traffic Facility. Ray listened patiently to David as
he recounted the strange dream he'd been having every night
for the past week. He didn't want to sound crazy,
(10:49):
he said, but what if the dream was some kind
of premonition? Much to David's relief, Ray Pinkerton didn't make
fun of him, nor did he dismiss him as some
(11:11):
kind of kook. To Pinkerton, the unnerving tremble he could
hear in David's voice was enough to convince him that
he should at least take him at face value. Whatever
the man was going through, he thought, it was clearly
very real to him. The fact that David begged Ray
not to tell the press about the call, that he
(11:32):
simply wanted to get it off his chest was also unsettling,
but Ray didn't really know what to say. He certainly
didn't believe in premonitions. In the end, he agreed to
pass the information up the chain, hoping that would at
least give David some reassurance. Later that afternoon, Ray called
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Public affairs Officer Jack Barker in the FAA's Atlanta office
and relayed everything. David told him how he claimed to
have dreamt about an American Airlines plane that banked oddly
to the side and almost flipped upside down before it
crashed into the ground, and how the engines had been
strangely silent when it did so. Ray also did its
(12:17):
best to recount the various landmarks that David pointed out,
the dull, single story building, the gravel path curving round
and leading onto a main road, and the wide open
field where the plane came down. There was something else, too,
although David had no idea what it meant. For some reason,
(12:38):
the number forty and the word Danbury, which he assumed
was related to the town of Danbury in Connecticut, kept
popping into his head. Like Ray, Jack Barker didn't dismiss
the dream out of hand, either. For years, his own grandfather,
a sea captain, had told a chilling story about how
(12:59):
he'd once been standing on the deck of a ship
as it sailed between Key West and South America when
he was suddenly struck in the chest by an albatross.
The event had so shocked him he'd made a note
of it in the ship's log, recording the precise time
it happened. When he returned home, he received the devastating
(13:19):
news that his daughter had died from yellow fever. According
to the grandfather, the time of her death was exactly
the same time the albatross had collided into him. But also,
just like Ray, Barker was at a loss with what
to do with the information, even if the dream really
(13:40):
was some kind of premonition. Aside from identifying the plane
as American Airlines, they had nothing substantial to act on.
There was nothing to identify what specific plane or flight
it was, nor to pinpoint exactly where the crash was
supposedly going to occur, and they certainly weren't about to
ground all American Airlines flights until they worked it out,
(14:04):
potentially thousands of flights a day. Barker agreed to log
it with American Airlines Cincinnati office just in case, but
beyond that there was nothing else to be done. Meanwhile,
it was around this time that an American Airline's DC
ten flight one nine one, bound for Los Angeles, was
(14:25):
taking off from Chicago's O'Hare Airport. About thirty minutes into
the flight, much to the captain's alarm, the planes left
engine suddenly failed. Thankfully, with its two other engines working fine,
he was able to turn the plane around and land
safely back in Chicago later that night. David Booth had
(14:49):
the dream again. On Friday, May twenty fifth, da VI.
It woke once more in the early hours of the morning,
sweating profusely with his heart banging in his chest, and
once again came that unbearable wave of sadness. It had
(15:12):
now been ten days straight since he began dreaming of
the plane crash. But things were different this time. The
sadness that had usually evaporated by mid morning refused to
leave him. Three hundred and twenty miles away to the north.
Back at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, a bright sun lit up
(15:34):
the late spring sky outside Gate K five on the tarmac.
American Airlines DC ten flight one nine one registration number
N one one AA was ready once more to make
its regular journey to Los Angeles. Inside the gate, one
(15:55):
by one, passengers for the two forty five PM flight
began filing in twenty six year old Margaret Stax from
a K Moos, Michigan, was excited to be heading out
to her first book by Its convention. Forty seven year
old author Judith Wax and her fifty one year old husband,
(16:15):
Sheldon were also heading to the convention. Five years ago,
when her daughter finally left for college and her son
joined the Harry Krishna movement, Judith began writing again within
a year. She was a witty and astute essayist in demand,
and now she was heading to the convention as a
celebrated author of a memoir she'd published only a few
(16:38):
weeks ago. She and Sheldon, who was going in his
capacity as managing editor of Playboy Magazine, were joined by
Sheldon's colleagues Mary Sheridan and Vickie Hayder. It was Vicky's
first time away from her one year old son Sean.
Though she was excited for the trip, her son was
(16:58):
all she could think about. Catherine and Joseph Benneck were
taking their eleven year old sons Stephen, on a short
break to make the most of the Memorial Day weekend,
while newlyweds Barbara and Peter Warner were still giddy with
excitement after getting married only three days ago. The couple
were on their way home from an all too brief honeymoon,
(17:21):
but looking forward to sharing it all with their families.
One after another, the passengers continued to arrive for the
two forty five pm flight to Los Angeles. Twenty four
year old Ray DeVito escort it its girlfriend, Deborah Maruzzi
(17:44):
as far as he could before the pair made their
good wyes and Deborah headed off toward the gate. The
couple had been seeing each other for two years and
still found it hard to be apart. Back in departures,
Ray took a seat by one of the windows facing
the runway so he could watch the plane take off.
(18:05):
Around two PM, a call went out to those waiting
hopefully on flight one nine one's reserved list. Among them
was thirty four year old Glenn Nichols, a communication specialist
who just spent the last three weeks at a training
course at the Bell System School. Glenn introduced himself to
the staff at the counter. He was in luck. They
(18:28):
told him a seat had just come available on the
sold out flight. Then a young woman appeared behind him,
a little flustered. She didn't want to be rude, she said,
but was there any chance that she could have the seat?
Seeing how desperate she was, Glenn happily agreed to let
her take it. The woman smiled with relief and thanked
(18:50):
Glenn profusely before joining the rest of the passengers, while
Glenn walked off to find another flight. Finally time for
the passengers to board the plane. There were two hundred
and fifty eight in total, along with eleven working crew
and two off duty flight attendants hitching a lift to
(19:11):
their next flight. One by one, they took their seats
in the plane. Mary and Richard cap, both in their fifties,
fastened their seat belts, then held hands as pilot Captain
water Lux welcomed them all aboard through the speaker system.
This would be their first vacation in ten years. Elsewhere,
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Susan and Stephen Lang from Bull Valley near Woodstock, wondered
anxiously how their children, three and a half year old
Joy and eight year old Bryson would cope without them
while they were away, but it wouldn't be long, they
reminded themselves. They'd be back home with them soon. With
(20:00):
every one on board and settled into their seats, the
no smoking sign was lit up and the attendants began
their safety briefing. The flight was scheduled to take roughly
four hours and would include one hot meal and a
movie shown on a handful of screens dotted about the cabin.
Before that, however, Captain Lux invited the passengers to watch
(20:24):
the plane take off fire the cockpits in flight camera.
The camera was a unique feature of the American Airlines
d C ten that allowed passengers to see directly out
of the cockpit for the entirety of the take off process,
as if they were flying the plane themselves. At just
after two fifty six p m. Eleven minutes behind schedule,
(20:47):
Captain Lux received word from air traffic control that they
were now clear to make it out to the runway.
He fired up the plane's engines and slowly eased it
away from the gate. A few minutes later, Flight one
nine one was perched at the end of runway thirty two,
right as it waited for an incoming plane to land.
(21:10):
Up in the air traffic control tower, Controller Edward Rucker
was supervising. At three oh one, he gave Captain Lux
and First Officer James Dillard the green light. American one
nine one cleared for takeoff. American one nine one underway,
replied the Captain. Rucker watched from the tower as the
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plane nudged onto the end of the runway, and then,
after a brief pause, it began to take off steadily.
It gained speed. There's eighty knots, said Captain Lux, as
the plane continued to accelerate. All the while, something unseen
was happening inside the plane's left pylon. A fracture that
(21:56):
had begun weeks ago and had only grown bigger with
every vibration from every flight since then, had now grown
to nearly a foot in length. Rucca continued to watch
as the plane powered forward, going from eighty to one hundred,
then to one hundred and fifty miles per hour, and
beyond V one, the point of no return, from where
(22:20):
it is impossible to abort a take off without catastrophic consequences.
At one hundred and seventy five miles per hour, the
plane's nosewheel began to lift up from the tarmac. As
it did, Mark Rucca saw something utterly horrifying. The plane's
left engine was moving independently of the plane, as if
(22:42):
it were trying to take off on its own. It
bounced and jostled for a moment, then completely disconnected, flew
up over the wing, and fell with a crash onto
the runway. He blew an engine, cried Ruccia in terror
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as he watched Flight one nine to one ease up
into the sky. Even still, Rucca knew the plane was
capable of flying on two engines, provided it got enough speed.
Keeping his eyes fixated on the jet, Rucca radioed the
cockpit American one nine one, do you want to come back?
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But there was no reply because, unknown to Rucca and
the flight crew, the cable for the cockpit voice recorder
had been damaged when the engine fell off. All Rucca
could do then was watch and pray. At first, it
looked as though it would be okay. The plane, or
(23:48):
bit jettisoning vast streams of silver hydraulic fluid from its
left wing, continued its usual trajectory into the air, but
then it started to bank oddly to the left. On
take off, Captain Lux and First Officer Dillard had no
doubt seen the warning light telling them that the left
(24:09):
engine had failed. In response, Dillard swiftly raised the nose
to fourteen degrees and reduced the plane's speed from one
hundred ninety to one hundred seventy six miles per hour,
standard procedure for an engine failure. But what he and
LUs didn't know was that the engine hadn't just failed,
it had completely broken away from the plane, destroying numerous
(24:33):
hydraulic systems in the process. As a result, they no
longer had control over the left wing slats, meaning now
the speed at which the plane could stall was far
higher than the pilots realized. So when First Officer Dillard
reduced speed, he would have been utterly horrified to find
(24:54):
the left wing suddenly beginning to stall, And then the
plane began to tilt and tilt more and more until
the right wing was pointing straight up perpendicular to the ground.
From the eighty Sea Tower, Rucker and his colleagues could
only watch on in helpless horror down on Tooey Avenue,
(25:18):
about a mile north of O'Hare Airport. Service station manager
Richard du Sec, distracted by a strange rumble in the sky,
looked up just in time to see the bizarre site
of a plane sailing past the window, tilting so far
over it had almost become inverted, white liquid streaming from
(25:39):
its left wing where an engine should be. Then the
strange rumble stopped, replaced by an eerie, ominous silence as
the plane began suddenly to fall from the sky. Du
Sec screamed for his sixteen year old assistant Alan Rodgers
to get down as the plane slammed into the ground,
(26:00):
exploding in a giant, red and orange ball of fire.
Glass rained down all around them as the windows blew
out from the force of the explosion. Fourteen year old
Mario Hubbard, from the nearby two emobile home park, which
the plane had just crashed into, was out biking with
(26:21):
friends when he heard the explosion, followed by the sight
of the huge fireball and a thick cloud of black smoke.
Mario raced back, grateful to fight his home had not
been destroyed. In a daze, he began to wander between
the trailers, the heat from the flames becoming ever more
intense as he inched closer and closer to the crash site.
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All about the ground was littered with debris and hot
ash fell from the sky. Then he saw something peculiar
lying between two trailers, a human arm American Airline's flight
(27:05):
one nine one plane registration N one one o a
A was in the air for about thirty seconds before
it turned almost completely over and slammed into a wide
open field next to an old single story storage hangar,
just beyond a gravel path that curved round before joining
(27:26):
a main road. From there, the wreckage continued forward, colliding
with three mobile home parks about a mile north of
the runway. With twenty one thousand gallons of fuel in
its tanks, it exploded in a vast ball of flames
that reached a hundred feet into the air, igniting power
(27:47):
lines and three mobile homes. Police officer Mike Delaney, having
watched the whole thing from inside its car, raced immediately
to the scene, Parking up as close as he could.
He hurried through charred foot high grass toward the epicentre
of the crash. It was strange. Despite the odd section
(28:08):
of a wing or piece of fuselage, there was little
sign of the plane at all. It had been almost
completely vaporized. Instead, all around were just eerie remnants of it,
scorched pages of in flight magazines flapping in trees, pieces
of twisted, blackened metal still smoking on the ground. Then
(28:31):
he saw a single foot lying in the grass, and
a pair of shoes with only the legs sticking out
of them. Elsewhere, dark smoke was rising from a blackened torso.
Then he saw a head. It was clear to him
then that no one had survived. Back in Cincinnati, around
(28:53):
eight pm later that evening, David Booth was at home
with his wife Pam, watching an adaptation of the John
Jake's American Revolution era novel The Rebels. He'd felt low
all day, unable to shake the profound sadness that had
refused to dissipate since he'd woken once again from his
(29:14):
terrible dream. At a break in the show, a newsflash
popped up on the screen. An image appeared, and David froze.
It showed the wreckage site of an American Airline's flight
that had just come down outside of Chicago's O'Hare Airport,
killing all two hundred and seventy one people on board.
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A bright aluminium covered DC ten, just like the one
he'd been seeing in his dream. David slumped to the
floor on Friday night, as rescue workers and investigators continued
(29:57):
to draw the crash site, David Boom lay down to sleep,
this time for the first time in eleven days. He
didn't experience the dream, and nor did he ever again.
When he and the rest of the world saw the
infamous photo of Flight one nine one captured by Michael Laughlin,
(30:19):
who had witnessed the crash from inside the airport, he
couldn't believe his eyes. There was simply no denying it. Now.
He thought he had seen a vision of the future,
and he had not been able to stop it, to
stop the plane from taking off and killing every one
on board. Down at the FAA's Atlanta office, Jack Barker
(30:42):
couldn't believe it either, though he would also never be
able to explain it. He couldn't help wondering if there
was anything more they could have done, though he knew
in his heart there was nothing. There were inconsistencies between
David's dream and what actually happened. He said it was
the right wing and not the left, that was missing
(31:02):
an engine, and that the plane had tilted to the right,
not the left. However, to many this seems a trifling
difference considering the general accuracy of what was an exceedingly
rare event in civil aviation. Despite David's initial desire to
keep out at the spotlight, there was simply no denying
(31:24):
the eerie similarity of his dream and the crash. On
May thirty first, he appeared on Channel five w e
w STV to share his story. David was down to
earth and genuine, a far cry from the usual characters
that try to pedal psychic powers, and though he no
(31:45):
longer had the dream, he became increasingly rattled by its
apparent implication, especially because those two other elements that had
accompanied it, the name Danbury and the number forty, appeared
to have not been accounted for. There was no one
on board with the name Danbury, nor did the number
forty seem to correlate with anything specific, such as the
(32:08):
flight number or plane registration, and David couldn't let it go.
After all, he'd already been right once. What if he
began to wonder, Danbury was the place Danbury as he'd
first assumed, and the number forty was a sign that
something was going to happen forty days after the initial crash.
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Even if there was only the slightest chance that he
might be right, David wasn't about to let anything happen again,
so this time he went public, telling everyone and anyone
that a crash was going to occur in Danbury, Connecticut,
on July fourth, nineteen seventy nine. As the day of
(32:58):
July fourth approached, residents in Danburry couldn't help but get
a little nervous about all the talk in the news
of David Booth's ominous new prediction. Lifeguards at the nearby
Hanging Rock State Park even devised an alarm signal should
a plane suddenly fall out at the sky and head
toward them, four sharp blows on the whistle, followed by
(33:22):
the instruction to run like hell. But in the end,
only rain fell from the sky that day. Fearing he'd
misunderstood something, David revised his prediction, saying it would happen
in the next few days instead. But still no plane
crashed in Danbury. It seemed whatever powers of premonition David
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once had had now left him. As for the victims
and their loved ones from Flight one nine one, in
the days Following the tragedy, it seemed the entire city
of Chicago came together to mourn the loss, which included
two individuals killed on the ground when the plane collided
with the mobile homes. Following an investigation, it was found
(34:10):
that neither pilot was culpable for the crash or the stall.
In fact, not one of thirteen pilots taking part in
specially devised simulations of the event were able to prevent
the destruction of the air craft. In twenty eleven, in
Lake Park, at the northwest corner of Lee and Two Avenues,
(34:30):
about two kilometers east of the crash site, a two
foot high brick wall featuring two hundred seventy three bricks
each named for one of the victims was constructed in
memory of all who lost their lives that day. David
Booth never did find a satisfactory answer for what the
word Danbury might have been referring to, and nor did
(34:53):
any of the many amateur sluts and puzzle enthusiasts who
pitched in with suggestions to the media in the months
following the store. As for the number forty, there was
one intriguing interpretation suggested by a man from New York
shortly after David's story was first published. If every letter
of the alphabet he said were given the number one
(35:16):
to twenty six, with A being one, B being two, etc.
Once applied to the words American Airlines, the resultant numbers
add up to one hundred and fifty one and what
is one hundred and fifty one plus forty one nine one?
(35:44):
This episode was written by Richard McLain Smith
It was late March nineteen seventy nine, and an unseasonably
warm day was settling in over Tulsa, Oklahoma. Down at
the main hangar of the American Airlines Maintenance Facility just
east of Tulsa Airport, mechanics and coveralls mingled with engineers
in crisp shirts and ties under bright fluorescent light, serenaded
(00:22):
by an endless wiz of drills and the thrum of
heavy machinery. The facility was then and still is the
world's largest commercial airlines base. Back in nineteen seventy nine,
it employed around six thousand people, servicing as many as
ten to fifteen aircraft at any one time. One of
(00:44):
them on that day in late March was a sparkling
aluminium paneled McDonnell Douglas DC ten registration number N one
one zero AA. The model was notable for its its
distinctive trijet design, with an engine on each wing and
(01:04):
one in the tail. This particular aircraft was seven years
old and had flown thousands of hours since its first
delivery in nineteen seventy two. It carried movie stars, people
on business families jetting off on vacation, but now it
was just another machine undergoing a routine maintenance check, including
(01:27):
an inspection of the engines. McDonnell Douglas had an official
procedure for this. It involved first removing the engine and
then the pylon, a curved strip of metal that held
the engine to the wing. It was a complex, meticulous job,
and one that also involved having to disconnect seventy nine
(01:48):
different cable systems, including hydraulic lines, fuel lines, and various
electric facilities. This was not only fiddly but also time consuming,
so engineers at American Airlines found a quicker way, a
more practical, cheaper way. Instead of taking the engine and
(02:08):
pylon apart separately, piece by piece, with the aid of
an overhead crane, they removed both sections in one go
as one single piece, using a regular forklift truck for support.
This way, they only had to disconnect twenty seven systems
instead of seventy nine, saving two hundred working hours every
(02:31):
time a plane underwent maintenance. And so it was that,
in the early hours of the midnight shift in the
hangar of that American Airlines maintenance facility in late March
nineteen seventy nine, the thirty first to be precise, the
same process was applied to plane N one one zero AA.
(03:00):
Forklift truck was brought forward and the platform attached to
its forks, was carefully positioned into place under plane N
one one zero AA's left engine. With the fork secured,
the mechanics got to work removing the engine along with
its supporting pylon. A few hours later, the midnight shift
(03:20):
came to an end, but the engine removal had not
yet been completed, so the forklift truck was simply left
in place, propping up the engine and the wing. The
truck's engine was then turned off and the midnight crew
clocked off for the day. Perhaps had someone been there,
they might have heard the faint hiss of pressure escaping
(03:43):
from the truck's hydraulics as its engine powered down, or
heard the pylon creek and shift ever so slightly out
of place as the truck's forks holding the plane's engine
in place slowly began to ease ever so slightly down,
Or perhaps it would have been imperceptible under the din
(04:04):
of all the rest of the noise in the hangar.
Either way, when the next crew arrived shortly after to
finish the task, they were surprised to find the pylon
a little out of line, but after a little bit
of jiggling with the fork lift, they soon managed to
ease it back into place and remove it accordingly. Later,
(04:25):
with the maintenance check complete, the tech crew finished up,
logged their time and headed home. By the afternoon of
March thirty, first d C ten N one one o
A A stood ready once more, its engines reattached, its
paperwork stamped and signed, but somewhere deep in the metal
(04:49):
of the aircraft's left pylon, unbeknownst to any one, a
near invisible, undetectable fracture was just beginning to appear. You're
listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard mc lean smith. David
(05:12):
Booth stood looking out over a strange, silent landscape. Ahead
of him was a large, nondescript field, a tree line
going down it, and a gravel path that curved around
from in front to behind him, leading onto a main road.
To his side was a dull, single story building. Distracted
(05:35):
by movement above, he looked up to see the shining
fuselage of a silver American Airlines jet arching through the sky.
It was strange, he thought to himself, how despite it
being so close the plane seemed to be flying completely silently,
with no sound coming from its engines. As it drew
(05:57):
ever closer, it began to bang oddly to the right.
More and more it turned until its left wing was
pointing upwards perpendicular to the ground. Then steadily it began
to fall. David watched on in utter horror as the plane,
now seemingly flying in slow motion, continued to fall, still
(06:21):
turning as it went. Then it plunged nose first straight
into the earth, exploding with a sickening roar in a
huge fireball of red and orange, followed by a billowing
plume of thick gray smoke. David shot up in his bed,
sweating profusely, struggling to catch his breath as tears streamed
(06:45):
down his eyes. Under the pale moonlight, he looked out
at his baby, Justin, sleeping soundly in his crib, then
turned to see his wife, Pam, lying fast asleep beside him.
He was at home, in his bed in Hyde Park, Cincinnati.
It was just a dream, he said to himself. It
(07:06):
was just a dream, And yet the dream and the
overwhelming sense of sadness that was now washing over him
was like nothing he'd ever experienced before. David spent the
rest of the night lying in bed, staring at the ceiling,
unable to shake the image of that plane smashing into
(07:26):
the ground as vivid then in his mind as it
was when he was dreaming it. When morning finally came,
he didn't have the words to explain it to Pam,
so he just washed and shaved, same as he always did,
and drove off to work. It was Tuesday, May fifteenth,
(07:46):
nineteen seventy nine. The following night, David Booth had the
dream again, the same dull building to his left, the
same American Airlines plane arching silently, horrifyingly through the sky,
(08:08):
its wings turning until it was almost upside down, before
slamming into the ground in a devastating ball of fire.
And once again David woke with tears streaming from his eyes,
crippled by a profound sense of sorrow. Then it happened
again the next night, and the next, and the next.
(08:32):
By Tuesday, twenty second of May, David had had the
same dream for seven nights in a row. Whenever he
remembered it the next day, it wasn't in that hazy,
fragmentary way that you try to fix a dream in
your mind. It was like a crisply embedded memory of
what he'd experienced the day before. Twenty three year old
(08:56):
David Booth, an office manager at the agency rent a
Car Reading, was a bright man with a long, patrician
face and plaintive, thoughtful eyes. He liked to play the
guitar and listen to Emmy Lou Harris, and had a
ponchant for self help books. What he didn't have any
time for was spooky stuff or any of that occult nonsense.
(09:20):
But this strange, incessant, terrifying dream was tearing him apart.
It even left him too scared to sleep come the evening.
He tried to keep himself awake as long as possible,
sitting alone in the darkness long after his wife Pam
had gone to bed, watching the Tonight Show, then the
(09:41):
Tomorrow Show, and even the test cards that came after.
But gradually his eyelids would begin to droop, and before
he knew it, he was back in that strange, eerie
field again, watching hell fall from the sky. Slowly, over time,
he began to wonder what if it wasn't just a dream.
(10:06):
On that Tuesday, May twenty second, Booth arrived at his
work with one thing on his mind. He didn't know
what he would say exactly, but he had to tell
someone what he was going through. If nothing else, he reasoned,
maybe by sharing his terrifying experience, he might bring it
to an end. He found a number for the Cincinnati
(10:27):
office of the Federal Aviation Administration and gave them a call. Eventually,
he was put through to Ray Pinkerton, assistant manager of
the Airway Traffic Facility. Ray listened patiently to David as
he recounted the strange dream he'd been having every night
for the past week. He didn't want to sound crazy,
(10:49):
he said, but what if the dream was some kind
of premonition? Much to David's relief, Ray Pinkerton didn't make
fun of him, nor did he dismiss him as some
(11:11):
kind of kook. To Pinkerton, the unnerving tremble he could
hear in David's voice was enough to convince him that
he should at least take him at face value. Whatever
the man was going through, he thought, it was clearly
very real to him. The fact that David begged Ray
not to tell the press about the call, that he
(11:32):
simply wanted to get it off his chest was also unsettling,
but Ray didn't really know what to say. He certainly
didn't believe in premonitions. In the end, he agreed to
pass the information up the chain, hoping that would at
least give David some reassurance. Later that afternoon, Ray called
(11:54):
Public affairs Officer Jack Barker in the FAA's Atlanta office
and relayed everything. David told him how he claimed to
have dreamt about an American Airlines plane that banked oddly
to the side and almost flipped upside down before it
crashed into the ground, and how the engines had been
strangely silent when it did so. Ray also did its
(12:17):
best to recount the various landmarks that David pointed out,
the dull, single story building, the gravel path curving round
and leading onto a main road, and the wide open
field where the plane came down. There was something else, too,
although David had no idea what it meant. For some reason,
(12:38):
the number forty and the word Danbury, which he assumed
was related to the town of Danbury in Connecticut, kept
popping into his head. Like Ray, Jack Barker didn't dismiss
the dream out of hand, either. For years, his own grandfather,
a sea captain, had told a chilling story about how
(12:59):
he'd once been standing on the deck of a ship
as it sailed between Key West and South America when
he was suddenly struck in the chest by an albatross.
The event had so shocked him he'd made a note
of it in the ship's log, recording the precise time
it happened. When he returned home, he received the devastating
(13:19):
news that his daughter had died from yellow fever. According
to the grandfather, the time of her death was exactly
the same time the albatross had collided into him. But also,
just like Ray, Barker was at a loss with what
to do with the information, even if the dream really
(13:40):
was some kind of premonition. Aside from identifying the plane
as American Airlines, they had nothing substantial to act on.
There was nothing to identify what specific plane or flight
it was, nor to pinpoint exactly where the crash was
supposedly going to occur, and they certainly weren't about to
ground all American Airlines flights until they worked it out,
(14:04):
potentially thousands of flights a day. Barker agreed to log
it with American Airlines Cincinnati office just in case, but
beyond that there was nothing else to be done. Meanwhile,
it was around this time that an American Airline's DC
ten flight one nine one, bound for Los Angeles, was
(14:25):
taking off from Chicago's O'Hare Airport. About thirty minutes into
the flight, much to the captain's alarm, the planes left
engine suddenly failed. Thankfully, with its two other engines working fine,
he was able to turn the plane around and land
safely back in Chicago later that night. David Booth had
(14:49):
the dream again. On Friday, May twenty fifth, da VI.
It woke once more in the early hours of the morning,
sweating profusely with his heart banging in his chest, and
once again came that unbearable wave of sadness. It had
(15:12):
now been ten days straight since he began dreaming of
the plane crash. But things were different this time. The
sadness that had usually evaporated by mid morning refused to
leave him. Three hundred and twenty miles away to the north.
Back at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, a bright sun lit up
(15:34):
the late spring sky outside Gate K five on the tarmac.
American Airlines DC ten flight one nine one registration number
N one one AA was ready once more to make
its regular journey to Los Angeles. Inside the gate, one
(15:55):
by one, passengers for the two forty five PM flight
began filing in twenty six year old Margaret Stax from
a K Moos, Michigan, was excited to be heading out
to her first book by Its convention. Forty seven year
old author Judith Wax and her fifty one year old husband,
(16:15):
Sheldon were also heading to the convention. Five years ago,
when her daughter finally left for college and her son
joined the Harry Krishna movement, Judith began writing again within
a year. She was a witty and astute essayist in demand,
and now she was heading to the convention as a
celebrated author of a memoir she'd published only a few
(16:38):
weeks ago. She and Sheldon, who was going in his
capacity as managing editor of Playboy Magazine, were joined by
Sheldon's colleagues Mary Sheridan and Vickie Hayder. It was Vicky's
first time away from her one year old son Sean.
Though she was excited for the trip, her son was
(16:58):
all she could think about. Catherine and Joseph Benneck were
taking their eleven year old sons Stephen, on a short
break to make the most of the Memorial Day weekend,
while newlyweds Barbara and Peter Warner were still giddy with
excitement after getting married only three days ago. The couple
were on their way home from an all too brief honeymoon,
(17:21):
but looking forward to sharing it all with their families.
One after another, the passengers continued to arrive for the
two forty five pm flight to Los Angeles. Twenty four
year old Ray DeVito escort it its girlfriend, Deborah Maruzzi
(17:44):
as far as he could before the pair made their
good wyes and Deborah headed off toward the gate. The
couple had been seeing each other for two years and
still found it hard to be apart. Back in departures,
Ray took a seat by one of the windows facing
the runway so he could watch the plane take off.
(18:05):
Around two PM, a call went out to those waiting
hopefully on flight one nine one's reserved list. Among them
was thirty four year old Glenn Nichols, a communication specialist
who just spent the last three weeks at a training
course at the Bell System School. Glenn introduced himself to
the staff at the counter. He was in luck. They
(18:28):
told him a seat had just come available on the
sold out flight. Then a young woman appeared behind him,
a little flustered. She didn't want to be rude, she said,
but was there any chance that she could have the seat?
Seeing how desperate she was, Glenn happily agreed to let
her take it. The woman smiled with relief and thanked
(18:50):
Glenn profusely before joining the rest of the passengers, while
Glenn walked off to find another flight. Finally time for
the passengers to board the plane. There were two hundred
and fifty eight in total, along with eleven working crew
and two off duty flight attendants hitching a lift to
(19:11):
their next flight. One by one, they took their seats
in the plane. Mary and Richard cap, both in their fifties,
fastened their seat belts, then held hands as pilot Captain
water Lux welcomed them all aboard through the speaker system.
This would be their first vacation in ten years. Elsewhere,
(19:35):
Susan and Stephen Lang from Bull Valley near Woodstock, wondered
anxiously how their children, three and a half year old
Joy and eight year old Bryson would cope without them
while they were away, but it wouldn't be long, they
reminded themselves. They'd be back home with them soon. With
(20:00):
every one on board and settled into their seats, the
no smoking sign was lit up and the attendants began
their safety briefing. The flight was scheduled to take roughly
four hours and would include one hot meal and a
movie shown on a handful of screens dotted about the cabin.
Before that, however, Captain Lux invited the passengers to watch
(20:24):
the plane take off fire the cockpits in flight camera.
The camera was a unique feature of the American Airlines
d C ten that allowed passengers to see directly out
of the cockpit for the entirety of the take off process,
as if they were flying the plane themselves. At just
after two fifty six p m. Eleven minutes behind schedule,
(20:47):
Captain Lux received word from air traffic control that they
were now clear to make it out to the runway.
He fired up the plane's engines and slowly eased it
away from the gate. A few minutes later, Flight one
nine one was perched at the end of runway thirty two,
right as it waited for an incoming plane to land.
(21:10):
Up in the air traffic control tower, Controller Edward Rucker
was supervising. At three oh one, he gave Captain Lux
and First Officer James Dillard the green light. American one
nine one cleared for takeoff. American one nine one underway,
replied the Captain. Rucker watched from the tower as the
(21:34):
plane nudged onto the end of the runway, and then,
after a brief pause, it began to take off steadily.
It gained speed. There's eighty knots, said Captain Lux, as
the plane continued to accelerate. All the while, something unseen
was happening inside the plane's left pylon. A fracture that
(21:56):
had begun weeks ago and had only grown bigger with
every vibration from every flight since then, had now grown
to nearly a foot in length. Rucca continued to watch
as the plane powered forward, going from eighty to one hundred,
then to one hundred and fifty miles per hour, and
beyond V one, the point of no return, from where
(22:20):
it is impossible to abort a take off without catastrophic consequences.
At one hundred and seventy five miles per hour, the
plane's nosewheel began to lift up from the tarmac. As
it did, Mark Rucca saw something utterly horrifying. The plane's
left engine was moving independently of the plane, as if
(22:42):
it were trying to take off on its own. It
bounced and jostled for a moment, then completely disconnected, flew
up over the wing, and fell with a crash onto
the runway. He blew an engine, cried Ruccia in terror
(23:07):
as he watched Flight one nine to one ease up
into the sky. Even still, Rucca knew the plane was
capable of flying on two engines, provided it got enough speed.
Keeping his eyes fixated on the jet, Rucca radioed the
cockpit American one nine one, do you want to come back?
(23:28):
But there was no reply because, unknown to Rucca and
the flight crew, the cable for the cockpit voice recorder
had been damaged when the engine fell off. All Rucca
could do then was watch and pray. At first, it
looked as though it would be okay. The plane, or
(23:48):
bit jettisoning vast streams of silver hydraulic fluid from its
left wing, continued its usual trajectory into the air, but
then it started to bank oddly to the left. On
take off, Captain Lux and First Officer Dillard had no
doubt seen the warning light telling them that the left
(24:09):
engine had failed. In response, Dillard swiftly raised the nose
to fourteen degrees and reduced the plane's speed from one
hundred ninety to one hundred seventy six miles per hour,
standard procedure for an engine failure. But what he and
LUs didn't know was that the engine hadn't just failed,
it had completely broken away from the plane, destroying numerous
(24:33):
hydraulic systems in the process. As a result, they no
longer had control over the left wing slats, meaning now
the speed at which the plane could stall was far
higher than the pilots realized. So when First Officer Dillard
reduced speed, he would have been utterly horrified to find
(24:54):
the left wing suddenly beginning to stall, And then the
plane began to tilt and tilt more and more until
the right wing was pointing straight up perpendicular to the ground.
From the eighty Sea Tower, Rucker and his colleagues could
only watch on in helpless horror down on Tooey Avenue,
(25:18):
about a mile north of O'Hare Airport. Service station manager
Richard du Sec, distracted by a strange rumble in the sky,
looked up just in time to see the bizarre site
of a plane sailing past the window, tilting so far
over it had almost become inverted, white liquid streaming from
(25:39):
its left wing where an engine should be. Then the
strange rumble stopped, replaced by an eerie, ominous silence as
the plane began suddenly to fall from the sky. Du
Sec screamed for his sixteen year old assistant Alan Rodgers
to get down as the plane slammed into the ground,
(26:00):
exploding in a giant, red and orange ball of fire.
Glass rained down all around them as the windows blew
out from the force of the explosion. Fourteen year old
Mario Hubbard, from the nearby two emobile home park, which
the plane had just crashed into, was out biking with
(26:21):
friends when he heard the explosion, followed by the sight
of the huge fireball and a thick cloud of black smoke.
Mario raced back, grateful to fight his home had not
been destroyed. In a daze, he began to wander between
the trailers, the heat from the flames becoming ever more
intense as he inched closer and closer to the crash site.
(26:45):
All about the ground was littered with debris and hot
ash fell from the sky. Then he saw something peculiar
lying between two trailers, a human arm American Airline's flight
(27:05):
one nine one plane registration N one one o a
A was in the air for about thirty seconds before
it turned almost completely over and slammed into a wide
open field next to an old single story storage hangar,
just beyond a gravel path that curved round before joining
(27:26):
a main road. From there, the wreckage continued forward, colliding
with three mobile home parks about a mile north of
the runway. With twenty one thousand gallons of fuel in
its tanks, it exploded in a vast ball of flames
that reached a hundred feet into the air, igniting power
(27:47):
lines and three mobile homes. Police officer Mike Delaney, having
watched the whole thing from inside its car, raced immediately
to the scene, Parking up as close as he could.
He hurried through charred foot high grass toward the epicentre
of the crash. It was strange. Despite the odd section
(28:08):
of a wing or piece of fuselage, there was little
sign of the plane at all. It had been almost
completely vaporized. Instead, all around were just eerie remnants of it,
scorched pages of in flight magazines flapping in trees, pieces
of twisted, blackened metal still smoking on the ground. Then
(28:31):
he saw a single foot lying in the grass, and
a pair of shoes with only the legs sticking out
of them. Elsewhere, dark smoke was rising from a blackened torso.
Then he saw a head. It was clear to him
then that no one had survived. Back in Cincinnati, around
(28:53):
eight pm later that evening, David Booth was at home
with his wife Pam, watching an adaptation of the John
Jake's American Revolution era novel The Rebels. He'd felt low
all day, unable to shake the profound sadness that had
refused to dissipate since he'd woken once again from his
(29:14):
terrible dream. At a break in the show, a newsflash
popped up on the screen. An image appeared, and David froze.
It showed the wreckage site of an American Airline's flight
that had just come down outside of Chicago's O'Hare Airport,
killing all two hundred and seventy one people on board.
(29:36):
A bright aluminium covered DC ten, just like the one
he'd been seeing in his dream. David slumped to the
floor on Friday night, as rescue workers and investigators continued
(29:57):
to draw the crash site, David Boom lay down to sleep,
this time for the first time in eleven days. He
didn't experience the dream, and nor did he ever again.
When he and the rest of the world saw the
infamous photo of Flight one nine one captured by Michael Laughlin,
(30:19):
who had witnessed the crash from inside the airport, he
couldn't believe his eyes. There was simply no denying it. Now.
He thought he had seen a vision of the future,
and he had not been able to stop it, to
stop the plane from taking off and killing every one
on board. Down at the FAA's Atlanta office, Jack Barker
(30:42):
couldn't believe it either, though he would also never be
able to explain it. He couldn't help wondering if there
was anything more they could have done, though he knew
in his heart there was nothing. There were inconsistencies between
David's dream and what actually happened. He said it was
the right wing and not the left, that was missing
(31:02):
an engine, and that the plane had tilted to the right,
not the left. However, to many this seems a trifling
difference considering the general accuracy of what was an exceedingly
rare event in civil aviation. Despite David's initial desire to
keep out at the spotlight, there was simply no denying
(31:24):
the eerie similarity of his dream and the crash. On
May thirty first, he appeared on Channel five w e
w STV to share his story. David was down to
earth and genuine, a far cry from the usual characters
that try to pedal psychic powers, and though he no
(31:45):
longer had the dream, he became increasingly rattled by its
apparent implication, especially because those two other elements that had
accompanied it, the name Danbury and the number forty, appeared
to have not been accounted for. There was no one
on board with the name Danbury, nor did the number
forty seem to correlate with anything specific, such as the
(32:08):
flight number or plane registration, and David couldn't let it go.
After all, he'd already been right once. What if he
began to wonder, Danbury was the place Danbury as he'd
first assumed, and the number forty was a sign that
something was going to happen forty days after the initial crash.
(32:32):
Even if there was only the slightest chance that he
might be right, David wasn't about to let anything happen again,
so this time he went public, telling everyone and anyone
that a crash was going to occur in Danbury, Connecticut,
on July fourth, nineteen seventy nine. As the day of
(32:58):
July fourth approached, residents in Danburry couldn't help but get
a little nervous about all the talk in the news
of David Booth's ominous new prediction. Lifeguards at the nearby
Hanging Rock State Park even devised an alarm signal should
a plane suddenly fall out at the sky and head
toward them, four sharp blows on the whistle, followed by
(33:22):
the instruction to run like hell. But in the end,
only rain fell from the sky that day. Fearing he'd
misunderstood something, David revised his prediction, saying it would happen
in the next few days instead. But still no plane
crashed in Danbury. It seemed whatever powers of premonition David
(33:44):
once had had now left him. As for the victims
and their loved ones from Flight one nine one, in
the days Following the tragedy, it seemed the entire city
of Chicago came together to mourn the loss, which included
two individuals killed on the ground when the plane collided
with the mobile homes. Following an investigation, it was found
(34:10):
that neither pilot was culpable for the crash or the stall.
In fact, not one of thirteen pilots taking part in
specially devised simulations of the event were able to prevent
the destruction of the air craft. In twenty eleven, in
Lake Park, at the northwest corner of Lee and Two Avenues,
(34:30):
about two kilometers east of the crash site, a two
foot high brick wall featuring two hundred seventy three bricks
each named for one of the victims was constructed in
memory of all who lost their lives that day. David
Booth never did find a satisfactory answer for what the
word Danbury might have been referring to, and nor did
(34:53):
any of the many amateur sluts and puzzle enthusiasts who
pitched in with suggestions to the media in the months
following the store. As for the number forty, there was
one intriguing interpretation suggested by a man from New York
shortly after David's story was first published. If every letter
of the alphabet he said were given the number one
(35:16):
to twenty six, with A being one, B being two, etc.
Once applied to the words American Airlines, the resultant numbers
add up to one hundred and fifty one and what
is one hundred and fifty one plus forty one nine one?
(35:44):
This episode was written by Richard McLain Smith
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