The Marshall Plane Crash

On the night of November fourteenth, nineteen seventy, Southern Airways Flight Nine Thirty-Two slammed into a wooded hillside just short of Tri-State Airport, killing all seventy-five people aboard. The chartered jet was bringing the Marshall University football team home to Huntington after a narrow loss in North Carolina. Among the dead were thirty-seven players, twelve coaches and staff, twenty-one fans and boosters, and five members of the flight crew.

It remains the worst sports related air disaster in American history. Investigators found the plane had descended below its safe altitude on approach, in rain and fog, with the runway never in sight. The tragedy gutted the town, but Marshall rebuilt its program almost from nothing, a story later told in the film We Are Marshall. Every year the university holds a memorial and lets a fountain run dry until spring.