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Deadly Coincidence: The Elizabeth Plane Crashes
🕑 Added 2023-09-26 10:15:01 +0000 UTCThere’s one interesting tangent to this story that I wasn’t able to find space for in the video – the crashes form the background for an award-nominated work of fiction by author Judy Blume. Judy Blume normally writes for children, but her 2015 novel In The Unlikely Event was aimed at adults, and prominently features the three crashes that struck Elizabeth in 1951 and 1952.
There’s good reason for this. Blume herself grew up in Elizabeth. Her father was a dentist, and he was involved in the process of identifying some of the badly-burned victims of the first crash. She’s said in interviews that she does have some memories from that time, but that she kept them “buried” until she started work on the novel.
The Elizabeth crashes aren’t particularly well-known, and so the book actually brought a lot of media attention to a relatively forgotten piece of history. I’ve ordered a copy. Though it’s common for disasters to be mentioned in fiction, it’s quite rare that they form an integral part of the story, so I’m looking forward to seeing how a talented writer like Blume handles a disaster that’s so personal to her.
Comments
Fascinating Horror
Oof - sorry to hear that. I remember staying near Heathrow a while back and even with triple-glazing the planes taking off would rattle the whole building. That must be tough to live with!
Fascinating Horror
What a complex sequence of events/things going wrong. Will add this one to my list - I always find it interesting covering disasters with a relatively unusual mechanism behind them!
Another excellent example of your work! Well done, thank you! I live just 10 minutes from Tampa International Airport and every 30-45 seconds planes pass within just a few hundred feet of our neighborhood ! The planes are absolutely enormous and extremely loud! I have to pause your videos until they pass! I can’t imagine ever getting used to this… and now Ive got a whole new paranoia to concern myself with… thanks! 😂😅
Michael Rutherford
Hadn't heard about these crashes before. At first I thought this was going to involve that plane crash I've heard of that hit a church steeple on its way down. As it turns out, I was thinking of the 1960 Munich C-131 crash. That crash happened as a result of water getting into the fuel pumps. Being denser then fuel, the water settled to the bottom of the pumps where the fuel inlets are. Since it was December, the water froze, blocking fuel from going through to the engines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_Munich_C-131_crash
