TWA Flight 599... The Plane Crash That Killed Knute Rockne

 TWA Flight 599... The Plane Crash That Killed Knute Rockne

March 31, 1931

The Crash That Killed A Legend and Changed Aviation

Professional baseball may be America's favorite sport, but football...college football in particular...holds second place in America's sports-loving heart, and has for over a century. There are those, in fact, who'll argue that College Football has actually edged baseball out for the title of 'America's Favorite Sport'.

College Football was already well on it's way to becoming a big deal when the turn of the last century rolled around, and continued to grow in popularity as the years beginning with '19' piled on. Fall Saturday afternoons quickly became synonymous with College Football, the first games of legendary rivalries that continue to this very day (Harvard-Yale Anyone?) were played, and alumni, along with their families, began the tradition of supporting their alma maters for decades after they graduated, attending games when they could, reading the Sunday morning sports pages religiously when they couldn't, and proudly wearing clothing emblazoned with their schools' logos and mascots year-round.

Fight songs have been around since the mid 1880s, and cheerleaders (The first ones, BTW, were male.) since 1898...both would become iconic fixtures of college football early on. Homecoming weekends got their start in November of 1911, when Missouri had their...and the nation's...very first homecoming game, tying Kansas 3-3 at old Rollins Field.

Speakin' of old Rollins Field...and the hundreds of football 'stadiums' at college campuses nationwide... most colleges didn't really have decent facilities for football at the turn of the last century. This, of course, presented a problem, because if schools were to make money off of football...and football was absolutely recognized as a potentially huge moneymaker early on...they needed somewhere for all of these newly rabid fans to comfortably watch football (And, of course, spend money in the process). To that end, colleges and universities were already building huge stadiums to accommodate those same rabid fans during the Twentieth Century's premiere decade. Harvard Stadium was built in 1903 and is still in use today, and Syracuse's Archbold Stadium was built in 1907 and was in use until it was replaced by the Carrier Dome in 1980.

 This stadium-construction-boom continued into the 1910s, when Georgia Tech's Grant Field (1913), among several others, was first built and really kicked into gear in the 'Roaring (And very sports minded) Twenties', when no fewer than fifty-five schools built big stadiums to host their home football games, several of them legitimately huge, seating as many as 60,000 fans. (Ohio State's iconic Horseshoe Stadium comes immediately to mind). 

These schools were not only building these ginormous stadiums, but also filling them with fans on Saturday afternoons. By the 20th Century's second decade, and most definitely by it's third, College football had legitimately become big business. Gate receipts were a big part of many university revenue streams, financing many of their budget items, and for said gate receipts to generate enough revenue to finance those budget items, the football program needed to attract capacity or at least near-capacity crowds to home games. These same fans not only bought tickets, they bought school-logo emblazoned merch and programs and concessions (All, then as now, over-priced, but still popular, and most important, profitable). The merchants in the college's home town benefitted as well...these same fans patronized stores, restaurants and hotels in the town.

 And of course there were the donations by alumni, particularly well-heeled alumni, with some of the more well-to-do among them making donations of thousands, and even tens of thousands of dollars to their beloved alma maters. 

College football had become such a big deal that, back in that era, railroads literally ran special trains on certain game weekends (The oldest rivalry in college football, Yale-Princeton, and the classic Yale-Harvard games being two of several that earned that particular perk).

 Of course there was a slight caveat. Fans didn't fill stadiums, spending copious amounts of cash in the process, to see their teams loose, and those huge donations had an unfortunate tendency of suddenly shrinking if not drying up entirely when the number of losses exceeded the number of wins.

For football to be profitable big business, then and now, the teams have to be good enough to, well, win games. Regularly. Preferably all or at least, most of them in any given season. For that to happen, the players have to be pretty outstanding, of course, but arguably just as or even more important is the coaching staff...and the head coach.

College football was already in the process of producing one legendary coach when '1899' clicked over to become '1900', in the person of one Glenn Scobey Warner, better known by one and all as 'Pop' Warner. Pop Warner headed up the football programs of several schools during the first three decades of the 20th Century, amassing a record of 319-106-32 for the regular season and 1-1-2 for bowl games while taking four of his teams...the first three at Pitt and the last at Stanford...to National Championships.

That's a pretty amazing record, averaging out to a phenomenal .733  winning percentage...but it's not the best. That honor belongs to a coach who's arguably also the most beloved coach in the long and storied history of college football.

Knute Kenneth Rockne...college Football's winningest and most beloved coach.

I'm pretty well convinced that when Knute Rockne entered this world on March 4th, 1888, he did so with a football in his hands, despite the fact that he was actually born in Norway, and American football as we know it, was still very much in an embryotic state.

 His family immigrated to the U.S. in 1893, when he was 5, settling in Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood. Young Knute learned to play football in the streets and vacant lots of Logan Square, then played football at the now long-gone Northwest Division High School. 

Chicago's Northwest Division High School,  at 1335 N. Claremont Street in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood, where Knute Rockne got his first taste of organized football. He left before he graduated, taking a job with the Post Office to earn money to attend Notre Dame.

The school opened in 1888, was renamed Tuley High School in 1908, and was expanded to meet growing enrollment a couple of times before being closed and replaced by Roberto Clemente High School in 1974. The building's still there, now owned by Jose Diego Community Academy.

After leaving high school...he never graduated... he worked for the Post Office for four years, saving up a majority of his salary for tuition at his school of choice...a small private Catholic university in South Bend, Indiana called Notre Dame. 

Rockne had to take and pass an entrance exam to be admitted. He passed with flags flying, and was admitted into the Notre Dame class of 1914, despite the facts that he had no high school diploma, and that he was Protestant...Notre Dame was a Catholic school, and a tiny one at that, with an enrollment of less than 500 students.

Rockne quickly settled in at The Home Of The Fighting Irish, majoring in Chemistry and Pharmacy studies and, all but inevitably, going out for football. He equally inevitably made the team, and immediately began showing just how the position of 'end' should be played. He did so well, in fact that he was inducted as an All American in 1913...the same year that he and Fighting Irish quarterback Charlie 'Gus' Dorals proved just how effective the Forward Pass was as an offensive tool, kicking a heavily favored Army team's butt in the process...we'll take a better look at this game in 'Notes'.

After graduating in 1914, Knute actually taught chemistry and worked as a lab assistant at Notre Dame, working with famed chemist Julius Arthur Nieuwland, a job he kept for about a year. Before 1914 was over he'd realized that he really didn't like Chemistry or labs, and he would rather play football.

He assisted coaching the Irish for a season, before going Pro for a couple of years, signing on with the Akron Indians, where coach Peggy Parrott had him playing both end and halfback. In 1915, he'd moved to the Massillon Ohio Tigers, along with former Notre Dame teammate Charlie Dorals. The two of them pretty much introduced the forward pass to Pro football, taking the Tigers to the league championship in 1915.

Rockne had a couple of coaching jobs during the next two years (Suffering one of his few big losses when the Toledo Maroons clobbered the South Bend 'Jolly Fellows Club' 40-0), then ended up back at his Alma Mater as head coach in 1918, replacing retiring head coach Jess Harper. 

Let the magic, as they say, begin.

His premiere season as Head Coach, played as World War I wound down and many of America's college age, football playing youth were still 'Over There' fighting in the trenches, was nothing to write home about. First it was a shortened six game season, and second he only managed a .500 winning percentage, taking the Fighting Irish to three wins, a single loss and a pair of ties.

This would almost be the only thing even vaguely close to a loosing season that the Irish would see for the next twelve years. The Fighting Irish went 9-0 in both 1919 and 1920, and 10-1 in 1921..the years that George Gipp, Notre Dame's first All American, of 'Win one for The Gipper' fame, played for Notre Dame

Then, in 1922, four young men who would come to be known as The Four Horsemen of Notre Dame signed on...they would form the Irish offensive backfield for the next three seasons ('22, '23, '24). The Irish would loose only two games of the thirty played over the course of those three seasons. One each in both 1922 and 1923, both away games at Nebraska. They'd go undefeated for the ten game 1924 season.

Notre Dame was no longer a 'Little known private catholic college'. And Rockne's legend was steadily growing. Over the course of 1925, '26, and '27, Notre Dame only lost four games, and tied two, racking up records of 7-2-1, 9-1, and 7-1-1 respectively.

1928 must have been a building year, and was the only other season during Rockne' 13 year tenure that he stumbled a little...oh, they still had a winning season in1928, but just barely, ecking out a 5-4 record. While some schools...then and now...would do just about anything to have even that barely-over-.500 season, it was all but the equivalent of tanking for the Rockne era Fighting Irish.

 They came back strong for 1929 and 1930, though, going undefeated for both seasons, bringing home a pair of national Championships while they were at it. (And starting the 1930 season in a brand new stadium...we'll take a look at that in Notes).

Notre Dame kind of became America's football team...most especially among Irish Catholics..., the Fighting Irish fight song became an American sports anthem, and Rockne became a living legend as he kept winning games. Rockne became the 20's equivalent of a Rock Star, beloved not only nationally, but internationally His picture appeared regularly in the papers and on magazine covers, and on Saturday afternoons in the Fall, if a Notre Dame game was being broadcast on the radio, people who'd never even been to college rooted for them just as hard as the staunchest Irish alumnus.

If anything, Rockne was an even more popular figure around South Bend, and for good reason. After all, he put the town on the map in a big way. While he was at it, he promoted the team, designed uniforms, was regularly heard on local radio broadcasts, and wrote a weekly news column for the local paper. And it's said that he wasn't an egotistical and cocky celeb either, always having time to talk with his fellow South Bend citizens.

A huge part of his popularity stemmed from his morals and from how he treated his players. Rockne demanded the best from his players, but he also coached them to be good sports on the field, and to practice high morals both on and off the field. Rockne also made himself available as a mentor to his boys, and his players regularly sought him out for advice on how to handle their problems, be they academic, romantic, family, or personal, or if they just needed to talk. And one of the things his players...and the world...admired about him was the fact that he really listened when one of his guys came to him with a problem, listened and offered sincere and well-thought-out advice.

His players, to a man, would say that they thought of their coach as one of their best friends as well as their coach, and this sentiment was echoed by his fellow coaches as well.

He also raised a large and happy family in South Bend. In 1914 he met a lady named Bonnie Gwen Skiles, who he worked with at the time. The two fell in love, married and had four kids...Knute, Jr, William Dorias, Mary Jeanne, and John Vincent. They probably rented a home for the first several years of his coaching career, then bought a house at 1006 East St Vincent Street in 1923...six years later Rockne and his wife would have a custom built Tudor style home built at 1417 Wayne Street. Knute Rockne would only get to enjoy the house for two years or so, but his widow, Bonnie Rockne, finished raising all four kids there, and lived there until her death in June of 1956.

The home custom built for the Rockne's at 1417 Wayne Street in South Bend. Knute Rockne only got to enjoy his new home for two years before his death, but Bonnie Rockne finished raising all four Rockne kids there, and lived in the house until her own death in June of 1956.

The house was bought by friends of the Rocknes after Bonnie's death, and I believe it is was still owned by that family until going on the market in 2014. The 2014 list price of the 4180 Square foot home, which was built on a double lot, was $500,000...probably around 100 times greater than the 1929 construction cost.

Coaching football wasn't Rockne's only job as the Roaring Twenties wound down...The Rock, as his friends called him, was a car guy. Specifically, he was a Studebaker man. Studebaker was headquartered in South Bend, and Rockne had developed a close friendship with Studebaker CEO Albert Erskine at the beginning of his coaching career, when he started soliciting funds to expand Cartier Field, Notre Dame's 5,000 seat football stadium. 

Their friendship also developed into a professional relationship...Erskine much admired The Rock's coaching skills and wondered if they would translate into encouragement for his dealer network. One of Rockne's former players...Paul Castnor, who'd been an All-American fullback on the 1922 team...was  Sales Manager for Studebaker's commercial vehicle division, and in 1928, Castnor approached Erskine and Studebaker V.P., Paul Hoffman to sign Rockne as a motivational speaker at dealer banquets and automotive association events.

It wasn't a hard sell...Studebaker signed Rockne on to be Studebaker's special representative at said events to the tune of $5,000 per year (just over $100,000 in 2023 dollars). Two years later, after two straight undefeated football seasons that also yielded two straight National Championships, and a pair of very successful years working for Studebaker, he signed a new contract with the auto manufacturer...for $10,000 dollars a year (Just north of $200,000 2023 dollars) as the company's manger of sales promotions.

So life was treating Rockne quite well by 1931. Between his paycheck from Notre Dame and his salary at Studebaker, he was doing well enough to have the custom home mentioned above built for his family, and for him to send his two oldest sons off to boarding school, at Pembrooke Country Day School in Kansas City, Kansas. The boys attended Pembrooke at the suggestion of fellow Notre Dame alum, close friend, and at-the-time Kansas City Health Department' Commissioner of Child Health and Communicable Diseases D.M. Doc Nigro.

We'll take a look at both the two eldest Rockne boys and Doc Nigro's part in Knute Rockne's tragic last day and it's aftermath here in a bit. 

Knute Rockne's legend was alive and growing. He was loved by fans both in the U.S. and abroad, and most especially by the players he coached. He was so loved, in fact, that he grabbed the interest of another money machine...Hollywood.

Of course, as the 1930s began, the country had a major problem developing...a little financial snafu that would come to be known as 'The Great Depression'. People needed something positive to distract them from the nation's...and their own...financial issues. One of the least expensive distractions was an afternoon at the movies. A move ticket cost about thirty five cents in 1930...$6.99 in 2023 dollars. (And that's about half of the average ticket price today, so it would be a bargain even now). For that thirty-five cents, you not only got to see the feature film, you got a newsreel and a couple of cartoons or short features before the film started...not a bad way to spend a couple of afternoon or evening hours.

While the movies themselves have changed immensely over the last ninety or so years, the general method of finding cinema-worthy topics is pretty much the same. Find something that your target demographic was crazy about, make a movie about it, and hope that people actually came to see the thing.

 At the end of the 'Roaring Twenties' and beginning of the 1930s, sports was a hot topic, and Notre Dame's extraordinary football program was a particularly popular subject, so it stood to reason that, ultimately, someone would decide to make a movie about the team...and that's exactly what happened.

Sometime in 1930, a film writer and/or producer approached the suits at Universal Pictures with an idea for a football movie...specifically a Notre Dame Fighting Irish football movie. The usual deal making and hemming and hawing and such took place, contracts were signed, hands were shaken, and they had themselves a movie in the making, to be entitled 'The Spirit of Notre Dame'.

All of the pre-filming work began, with an eye on a early 1931 kick-off of filming, and a release date in the fall of the same year. Universal got hold of Knute Rockne sometime before the end of the 1930 football season, and asked him if he'd be willing to act as a technical advisor for the film, a request he agreed to readily and eagerly...I have a feeling his only stipulation was he wouldn't be available until the season was over.

I know he made one or two trips out to LA in late December of 1930, and may have made a trip or two in January and February '31, and was scheduled to make a trip out to LA on the last day of March of 1931.

This was a seriously busy week for Rockne.  All of the kids were apparently home for Spring Break, and sometime during the last couple of Weeks of March, Rockne, his wife Bonnie and their four kids left South Bend's very likely still cold early spring weather behind for a couple of weeks on Florida's sunny beaches. After getting his family settled in their vacation digs, Rockne caught a train home to South Bend, for the beginning of the Fightinng Irish's spring training. Once that was well under way, he left for Chicago, where he'd spend a day or so visiting his mom, then fly out to LA for his business there.

But the plans changed...The two oldest boys were due to return to Kansas City...and school...by train on March 31st. I don't know if Rockne called his good friend Doc Nigro just to catch up, or if Nigro got in touch with Rockne, but at any rate, the two of them ended up touching base by phone while Rockne was in Chicago. Mention was made of the two Rockne boys returning to school in Kansas City on that Tuesday morning, so Doc Nigro convinced Rockne to make the trip into a mini-reunion, talking him into catching a train to Kansas City, having breakfast at K.C.'s train station with he and his sons, and flying out of Kansas City to L.A. .

So Rockne purchased train tickets as well as going through T.W.A.'s  Chicago office to purchase tickets for the flight from K.C. to L.A. Sometime on the early evening of Monday, March 30, Knute Rockne said goodbye to his mom, caught a taxi to Chicago's Dearborn Street terminal, and boarded an overnight train to Kansas City, Ks.

The train probably pulled into K.C.'s Union Station around 7:00 AM on the cold, dreary, and drizzly morning of March 31st, and as promised, Doc Nigro was there to meet him. The game plan, apparently, was for the boys' train to arrive a few minutes after Rockne's, and for the boys to meet them in Union Station's restaurant, so Rockne collected his bags, and he and Nigro made their way to the restaurant, and ordered, figuring that they'd hear the announcement of the boys' train arriving momentarily.

Didn't happen, though. Unbeknown to the two men, the boys' train had been delayed by maybe a half hour somewhere on the line, and was running late. The two men ate breakfast and checked their watches. Rockne's plane was to depart Kansas City's Municipal airport, across the Missouri River from the train station around 9:15AM or a bit after, and it was now pushing 8:00 AM. They had a five or so mile ride through what was becoming seriously nasty weather to get to the airport...Rockne reluctantly decided that, if he was going to catch his plane, they needed to go.

The bill was payed, they made their way out to Nigro's car, and had business through the rainy, possibly slushy streets of Kansas City towards the municipal airport, situated on a peninsula on the other side of the Missouri River, likely using Broadway Boulevard and crossing the Missouri on the Second Hannibal Bridge, rolling into the airport's parking lot with time enough to spare for Rockne to knock out a quick telegram to his wife.

 Rockne and Nigro entered the terminal building, and Rockne first looked around, found the Western Union office, walked in, and sent a telegram to Bonnie Rockne and the two younger kids in Florida. The message was simple...

LEAVING RIGHT NOW <STOP> WILL BE AT THE BILTMORE <STOP> LOVE AND KISSES

After sending the telegram, he checked in and checked his baggage...a far, far simpler process than we're subjected to today...then he and Doc Nigro exited the terminal and walked across the apron to the big (For that era, anyway) tri-motored airliner crouched, nose-high, in the dull, rain and mist shrouded morning light of around 9:00 or so AM. As baggage and mail were loaded aboard, he turned and shook hands with Doc Nigro, thanking him for his hospitality, and telling him he'd see him later.

Nigro replied in like kind, and Rockne climbed the short stairway to board the Transcontinental and Western (TWA) Fokker F-10. Nigro likely retreated into the warmth of the terminal, watching as the Fokker's three engines started up, then as the airliner taxied out, turned into the wind at the end of the active runway, and took off, quickly disappearing into the mist and rain.

He'd see Rockne again far sooner than he imagined, and sadly, not in circumstances anyone would ever want to see a friend in.

**

As TWA Flight 599 lifts off of the Kansas City Municipal's active runway on that cold, nasty, long ago Tuesday morning, lets take a quick look at the aircraft itself...it's important, trust me. You'll see why in short order.

The Fokker F-10 was built and sold by Fokker Aircraft Corp. of America, AKA Atlantic Aircraft Corp. Fokker of America/Atlantic Aircraft Corp was a subsidiary of Fokker Aircraft Company, the very same company that built the nimble and deadly Fokker D-VII fighter used to excellent advantage by the Germans in WW-1, as well as the Red Baron's favorite mount, the equally deadly and even more nimble Fokker Tri-Plane.

The F-10 was an enlarged and updated variant of the popular eight passenger Fokker F-VIIB/3M, known as the Fokker Trimotor, and first flew in the late '20s. Like the F-VII, the F-10 was a three-engine high-wing monoplane that was very similar in lay-out to the all metal Ford Tri-motor, with an engine beneath each wing, close in to the fuselage, and  the third engine in the nose. The F-10, however, had more powerful engines than the F-VII and was larger, able to carry 12 passengers, at a cruise speed about 10 mph faster then it's smaller stablemate.

 The F-10 was 50'8" long with a wingspan of 71'2" and was 12'5" tall over the vertical stabilizer. The aircraft was powered by a trio of 425 HP Pratt & Whitney nine cylinder radial engines that would move it and twelve passengers along at a cruising speed of 120 MPH, 140 MPH flat out. The aircraft was handled by a crew of two...pilot, and copilot.

Not only a Fokker F-10, but the Fokker F-10 that was TWA Flight 599 on 3-31-31...NC999E, shown at Burbank's Union Air Terminal. The airport...much enlarged, of course, and now known as Hollywood-Burbank Airport...is still in business today, 

Note that the aircraft is still painted in Western Air Express livery in this photo, which was taken just before Western Air Express and three other airlines were forcibly merged to form Transcontinental and Western Air (TWA).

 TWA had a fleet of the big planes, but unfortunately they had a flaw...their wooden wings were prone to wing flutter if they flew faster then their cruise speed. The wing flutter became more pronounced...and even more dangerous... in rough weather. To make matters worse, water was managing to somehow get inside '99-Echo's right wing, and was slowly dissolving the glue that held the laminated wing spar together. 

TWA's pilots were actually afraid of the bird, though they kept that fact from the TWA Brass for fear of loosing their jobs. They felt that it was a matter of 'when' rather than 'if' one of the F-10s shed a wing mid-flight...and sadly they were right.

'Front Office' of a Fokker F-10. Cockpits were hundreds of times less complex ninety or so years ago than they are today. The gauges in the center of the panel were the center (Nose) engine's engine instruments, the engine instruments for the right and left engines were outside the cockpit, mounted on the struts supporting the the engine nacelles.

 Also note the single control wheel, probably on a 'throw-over' control yoke that would allow the copilot to swing the control yoke over to his side and take the aircraft...this set up would likely be an absolute pain in an emergency, though. There's a reason that aircraft, from the smallest Pipers and Cessnas to the Airbus A380, Boeing 747 and  Boeing C-17 have had dual controls since the 1920s...only a few aircraft manufacturers have gone with this 'Throw-over' control yoke.

Fokker F-10 passenger cabin. This is actually a Pan-Am plane, but TWA's planes were essentially identical. You're looking forward, the door on the far end of the cabin leads to the cockpit, which is situated several feet higher than the passenger cabin. Note the wicker seats with no seat belts. 

And now we get to a very important feature of the F-10...it's construction. The fuselage was constructed of fabric over a steel tube frame as were the vertical and horizontal stabilizers. Some all metal construction was utilized for the engine nacelles. The wings, however were of all-wood construction, with the spars and ribs constructed of built-up layers of marine grade plywood, the layers glued together using a massively strong, but water based...and soluble...adhesive. Needless to say, that was to become a huge factor in our story. The wooden wing structure was sheathed in thin veneer of marine-grade plywood, then, like the fuselage, covered with fabric.

Fokker built sixty-five of the aircraft in total. The most famous was the one utilized by Admiral Richard Byrd in his exploration of the Artic. The most infamous would end up being the TWA bird bearing the registration number NC999E on it's tail and beneath it's right wing...the one that Knute Rockne climbed aboard along with five other passengers on that cold, nasty Tuesday morning a bit before 9:15 AM.

**

The big Fokker was in the soup almost the instant it started climbing out. The north-eastern quarter or so of Kansas was beneath an early spring reminder that winter was over when Mother Nature said it was over. A cold front sweeping across that end of the state had spawned a truly nasty little weather system bringing fog, rain/freezing rain and a little snow along with low ceilings and winds aloft that would definitely tend to make the ride less than fun.

If a modern Boeing or Airbus climbed out of Kansas City's new International Airport into such gunk today, the pilot would just announce that it might be a little bumpy until they came out 'On Top', keep the 'Seatbelt' sign lit, and punch through the mess until, five or ten minutes after entering the soup, they broke out of the clouds beneath some of the most beautiful blue skies known to man with a cottony undercast below them. Then, our modern pilot would level out at flight-level three hundred and something, swing westward, and fly non-stop to L.A., arriving around three or four hours after departing Kansas City.

But back in 1931, TWA pilot Robert Fry and copilot Herman 'Jess' Mathias didn't have the option of doing any of those things. The Fokker F-10's service ceiling of 18,000 feet may have allowed it to ultimately get on top of the storm, but the plane wasn't pressurized (The first pressurized airliner, the Boeing 307 Stratoliner, wouldn't go in service until 1940) so while the plane could make it to 18,000 feet, the passengers and crew, well, couldn't. 

A non-stop trip from KC to L.A. wasn't possible either, as the F-10 only had a range of 795 miles, meaning Flight 599 would have to make several refueling stops before touching down at Burbank's Union Air Terminal. The flight had actually originated in Columbus, Ohio, and Kansas City was it's first stop, the next would be at Wichita, Kansas, 173 miles distant, where they were scheduled to take on passengers and top off with fuel. Sadly, they would never make it there.

Neither of these factors should have been a big deal. Scud-running...the practice of flying just below the weather to keep the ground in sight...was routine practice back in 1931, as was 'Blind Flying ('Instrument' flying and 'Instrument Flight Rules...or IFR...wasn't officially a thing yet ninety-two years ago.) and pilot Robert Fry, who had logged 200 of his total 2500 flying hours in the last month, was known as one of TWA's best 'Blind Flying' pilots, so whether the Fokker was brushing the bottom of the cloud layer or solidly in the soup, Bob Fry would have had it handled.

And as for the limited range, that was 'business as usual' as well. Every transcontinental flight hedge-hopped between fields, making multiple stops like a local train, to drop off and pick up passengers as well as to top off the tanks. Albuquerque, New Mexico, for example, was almost the 'Atlanta' of 1930s transcontinental air travel, as just about every cross-country flight stopped there for fuel. 

As Knute Rockne and his five fellow passengers settled into their cushioned wicker seats, Bob Fry swung the Fokker to the southwest and climbed to the bottom of the overcast...it was not going to be a pleasant flight. There was some light snow mixed in with the misty rain that was falling in Kansas City, the ceiling was maybe a thousand feet, and visibility was around two miles...these conditions would prevail for maybe the first half or so of the short hop to Wichita before steadily worsening..

So the ride, while pretty much 'business as usual' in many ways, probably wasn't exactly comfortable. Aircraft of that era didn't have seatbelt signs, of course (And to be frank, I'm not even sure the wicker seats they were equipped with even had seatbelts) but the passenger cabin was small enough and close enough to the pilots that Bob Fry could call back to them (And he would be shouting back...two of those big radials were hard by the cabin, right outside the windows) to hang on, it might get bumpy. I have a sneaking suspicion, though, that Rockne and his five fellow passengers had figured that one out early on, and were clutching the arms of their seats with white-knuckled grips. It was not a pleasant trip.

To make matters worse, the Fokker's had a serious flaw...wing flutter. If the plane's airspeed crept much above it's 120MPH cruising speed the wingtips would flutter up and down rapidly, as much as six to eight inches...a phenomenon easily felt in the cockpit. Oh...it was exacerbated by rough weather.

All of the TWA pilots knew about this problem, and frankly, many of them were terrified of flying the Fokkers because of the wing flutter, but they were also terrified of losing their jobs if they complained or (Don't even think it!) refused a flight. So, little or nothing was said...or done...about it.

A map of the route between Kansas City and Wichita, showing the approximate flight path that Flight 599 would have taken...solid black line is the approximate flight path the plane actually took, dotted line is the unflown route between the crash site and Wichita.

This was a straight, about 175 mile flight, about an hour and a half at the Fokker's cruising speed of 120 MPH...in good weather. The weather system the plane was flying through, however, not only slowed them down a good bit, the rough weather also very likely contributed to the catastrophic failure of the already water damaged wing spar. 

Satellite map of the area around the crash scene, showing the possible flight path taken by Flight 599. At 10:22 AM...a little over an hour after departing Kansas City..., the crew contacted Wichita, advised them they were about 25 miles Northeast of Cassoday, Kansas, which is around 20 miles south of Bazaar, and also advised them that the weather was bad and getting worse, and that they were so low that they were right on the ground.

Shortly after they also advised that they were turning back towards Kansas City. Depending on which of several versions you read, they were either still turning or had reversed course, were flying northeast when Wichita advised them that they had clear weather over Wichita's airport. Flight 599 was probably flying northeast, just west of Bazaar as this radio traffic was taking place, as several eyewitnesses reported seeing the plane flying in that direction.

They then turned back towards Wichita. Several minutes later, copilot Jess Mathias had Wichita confirm the weather there...Wichita asked if they were sure they could make it to Wichita, Mathias answered 'Not sure, just not sure...' This was at about 10:45, so the series of maneuvers and course changes described above took up about 25 minutes...but that last radio traffic was only seconds before the Fokker's right wing failed catastrophically just outboard of the right engine, causing the plane to enter a spin, and dive towards the ground at a steep, 50 degree angle, spinning as it fell.

It hit the ground inverted at around 200 mph, breaking in half, and ejecting five of the passengers...including Knute Rockne...through the floor. The crash site was a bit over a mile off of the road...what's now Kansas State Route 177, but brothers Edward and Arthur Baker, who were moving cattle from one field to the other, heard the crash, and were first on the scene. They notified authorities.

Hopefully this map helps illustrate what may have happened, but it's admittedly limited by my artistic skills (Or lack there-of). There is no way, of course, we'll ever know the exact route that Flight 599 flew before the crash, and the only facts we know for absolute sure is that the big Fokker augered in to that field at around 10:50 AM on that cold, nasty March morning,

 By about 10:20 AM, they were about thirty miles northeast of the small town of Cassoday, Kansas, which would have put them ten or twelve miles northeast of the even tinier hamlet of Bazaar...around 100 miles Southeast of Kansas City. The Fokker was actually cruising slower than it's normal 120 MPH cruising speed due to the nasty weather and the specter of wing flutter should have disappeared...but it hadn't. As it would turn out, rough weather could generate wing flutter at any speed, and on top of that, they had a badly weakened wing spar.

They were also behind schedule. After leaving KC at around 9:15, if the weather had been decent, allowing them to maintain their normal cruising speed, they should have been a bit south of Bazaar by 10:20, but the weather had slowed them significantly. Bob Fry was also flirting with the overcast, flying up inside the clouds as the ceiling lowered...as they neared Bazaar the ceiling had dropped to around 600 feet.

To make matters even worse, the rough weather probably had the plane bouncing as if it was slamming across a giant speed bump every few seconds. A bumpy flight in an aircraft isn't the same thing as hitting seas aboard ship during rough weather. On board a ship, the pitches and rolls are slower, but more extreme, while the same pitches and rolls aboard a plane in rough weather are quick and sudden...more like hitting a pot-hole, or maybe a sink-hole.

 These sudden jerky changes in both attitude and altitude were what Frye was fighting, handling control yoke, rudder pedals, and trim to try and keep the plane up-right and under control, and doing this while 'flying blind...what modern pilots refer to as 'Flying on instruments'.

 On top of that, the weather was getting steadily worse, with the ride becoming bumpier with every passing minute. Fry dropped the nose, and snuck below the clouds. The ceiling had dropped even more...the ground seemed almost close enough for them to hop out of the craft and land safely on their feet.

'This crap's getting worse, Jess... Get on the  horn, call Wichita, tell 'em we're about twenty-five miles  northeast of Cassoday, and we're heading back for  K.C...I'm going to go back and wait this mess out...'

'What if K.C.'s socked in?'

I'll try to make it to Olpe (A small town about 20 miles east of them that, apparently, had an airfield) If we can't make it to Olpe, I'll set us down in a field and wait it out' (One of the few advantages early airline travel had over modern airliners...the ability to land in a farm field and still have an airworthy aircraft afterward).

'Jess' Mathias picked up the radio mike, hailed Wichita's tower, and advised them ''Wichita, TWA flight 599, it's getting rough out here...We're about 25 miles northeast of Cassoday, and we're right on the ground...returning to Kansas City to wait out the weather...' Mathias felt the big tri-motor bank into a sweeping turn to the right. The Fokker bounced and pitched even as they reversed course slowly, until they were aimed back towards Kansas City. They were just above the bottom of the cloud layer, and once in a while, Fry and Mathias (Along with their six passengers) got a glimpse of the mowed over wheat fields and cattle ranches only five hundred or so feet below them.

'TWA, say again, you advise you're on the ground?' Crackled over Matthias headset, partially buried under the roar of the three radial engines.

'Negative, Wichita,...we're still airborne, flying very low, weather getting worse, and we're heading back to Kansas City...'

'TWA, if you can make it through, we're in clear weather. Unlimited ceiling, visibility about 7-10, winds light and variable. Heavy clouds well to our northeast..'

'That would be the clouds we're smack dab in the middle of', Mathias may have thought silently to himself even as another wave of turbulence tossed them around like a feather near a ceiling fan. He looked over at the pilot, who had been listening to the conversation through his own headset..

'We're way closer to Wichita then we are Kansas City...tell 'em we're going to try to make it, if they're clear there, we should break out of this crap here soon....Advise 'em that if we can't get to them, we may can get to Olpe, and barring that. I can set it down in a field if I have to...' Fry noted as he continued the turn, bringing them around in a full circle and aiming them, once again, towards Wichita. Mathias nodded acknowledgement, and relayed what Fry had just told him to Wichita.

When Knute Rockne climbed aboard Flight 599, he realized that one of his fellow passengers...John Happer, of Chicago...was a close friend. Happer was enroute to California to oversee the opening of a new Wilson Sporting Goods store, and he and Rockne were close friends. It's a good bet that the two of them grabbed seats on either side of the narrow center aisle, and exchanged 'Lovely today to be flying, huh?' type greetings. Rockne and Happer then likely introduced themselves to their fellow passengers ...the cabins of those early airliners were tight...and the six men very likely soon began an in-depth discussion of College Football.  Rockne's picture had been in the newspaper and magazines all but constantly, as well as appearing on the newsreels that preceded movies of the era hundreds of times, and he was instantly recognizable to anyone who was a college football fan, a group that likely included most if not all of Rockne's fellow passengers.

It's a good bet that Rockne also gave The Spirit of Notre Dame... the movie he was serving as technical advisor for...a bit of free press, but by the time the Fokker banked into that first turn, back towards Kansas City, football and movie talk had been abandoned and the conversation had devolved into infrequent comments about the weather amid glances through the rain-streaked windows. When the plane turned back towards Kansas City, it's a pretty good bet that one or more of the six asked just what was going on, and when it started to turn back towards Wichita, one of them may have noted 'Oh, Jesus, don't tell me this guy's lost...'

It may have been just about this time that Rockne pulled the rosery our of his coat pocket. Though he was raised as a Lutheran, Rockne converted to Catholicism in 1925, and the rosary was given to him at the end of his confirmation ceremony by Notre Dame's Father Mooney. He held the rosary tightly in his right hand.

They had more reasons to be worried that they even knew. Every once in a while, they would feel a high-frequency shudder that was out of sync with the weather's jolt's and bumps, like maybe the right prop had a chunk gouged out of it, throwing it out of balance, except this shudder wasn't constant as the vibration from an out-of-balance prop would be.

The passengers may not have even noticed it, but Fry and Mathias did, and they knew exactly what it was...and it wasn't an out-of-balance prop. They were also dealing with wing flutter, and this time it seemed far more pronounced than usual. They were below the Fokker's cruising speed, but the rough weather was bouncing the wing around a new fulcrum, a few feet outboard of the right engine.....Fry and Matthias were fighting a loosing battle.

Unbeknown to them, water was getting in to the interior of the right wing. We'll never know where it was getting in, or for how long it had been doing so, but it was. And it wouldn't have been all that hard for it to do do. The skin covering the Fokker's fuselage, empennage, and wings (Along with those of the great majority of aircraft of that era) was doped fabric, which had the approximate consistency of heavy duty poster board. This fabric covered a thin plywood veneer on the wings...an up-tossed pebble hitting the right spot at the right speed could have punched through both with no problem at all, provided the  opening.

This water was attacking the main wing spar. Those laminated layers bonded together by water-soluble glue? They were delaminating. And the weakening spar was allowing the wing to pivot up and down around this new 'joint' in the spar. This, in turn, was rapidly finishing off that failing main spar. So when Bob Fry banked the Fokker back around towards Wichita, they only had minutes left.

While Wichita may have been experiencing clear weather, the weather just shy of sixty miles northeast of Wichita, near Bazaar, Kansas, was still steadily worsening. Fry gazed through the Fokker's rain-streaked windscreen, then over at the copilot. 'Ask Wichita about their weather again'.

Jess Mathias keyed up and repeated the same question he'd asked only a few minutes earlier, to get the very same reply. Wichita's tower operator then asked them if they were sure the could make it to Wichita. Matthias looked over at Fry, waiting for a response...as he waited, a repeat of the question crackled over speakers and headphones. Fry just said something like. 'Not sure....'

Mathias keyed up, telling Wichita... 'Don't know yet, just don't know yet...'  

And only minutes...possibly only a few seconds...later the starboard wing's waterlogged main spar gave up the ghost, snapping in two like a bitten-through popsicle stick...the thin outer sheathing gave way as the wing instantly folded upwards just outboard of the starboard engine and broke away from the aircraft. The plane rolled to the right suddenly and violently, and kept rolling into a spin, likely tossing all six passengers from their seats even as the nose dropped until the plane was diving earthward at about a fifty or so degree angle, constantly rolling towards the missing wing. 

You'd think the passengers would be tumbling around like loose change in a clothes dryer, but it's a good bet that, once that initial roll threw them from their seats, the spin's centrifugal force pinned them to the spot where they landed as if they were welded there. Eyes widened in terror, prayers were said, and Knute Rockne squeezed the Rosary given to him at his confirmation as if he was trying to get juice out of it.

 The fatally wounded plane corkscrewed through the bottom of the cloud layer, tossing mail bags and baggage out of the wrenched-open baggage compartment door with each revolution, arrowing earthward like a fast-spinning lawn-dart with all three engines still roaring. The Fokker was plummeting earthward at around 200MPH...far faster than it's normal top speed...and due to the spin and it's angle of descent, it was actually inverted about half of the time, and it was inverted when, at about 10:49am, it slammed into the wheat field about 2.5 miles south and slightly west of Bazaar, Kansas. Just before it hit, either Bob Fry or Jess Mathias did the absolute only thing they could do...one of them yanked all three throttles back to 'IDLE.

The Fokker augered in to the ground with a resounding 'THWOCK!!!, tossing a shower of dirt-clods ahead of it as it slammed into the semi-frozen field right wing low, burying both the starboard and center engines and crushing the cockpit almost back to the bulkhead separating it from the passenger cabin while the tail, along with ten or twelve feet of the aft fuselage, ripped loose and twisted violently almost a full 90 degrees to the right before the shattered fuselage slammed down into the dirt, upside down, the nearly severed tail jerking sharply upward, then slamming into the earth just a micro-instant after the rest of the fuselage did the same. The fuel tanks burst open as the plane slammed into the ground, spraying the wreckage with aviation-grade gasoline, but by some miracle, the fireball that should have erupted, didn't.

Five of the six passengers...including Knute Rockne...were ejected through the floor of the cabin to end up scattered ahead of the wrecked plane, their bodies horribly mangled. All were likely already dead when their bodies ripped through the cabin floor, killed instantly by the massive G-forces and crushing injuries inflicted by the impact.

Seconds after the plane slammed into the ground, the severed right wing came out of the clouds, sort of flutter-falling like a giant red and silver leaf, and smacked the ground about a quarter mile north of the main crash site. And then, for several minutes, there wasn't any sound at all, except maybe the shrill squawks of a couple of startled birds, and the ticking of the three cooling engines.

*

Aerial view of the main wreckage, after the bodes had been removed, taken at least several hours, and very possibly as much as a day, after the crash. The tail, inverted and twisted so it's perpendicular to the fuselage, is visible lower mid-screen...it's the white triangular piece of wreckage. The plane was in a spin and moving at around 200 MPH when it hit the ground inverted at a 50 degree angle, the impact so great that it twisted the tail around 90 degrees and ejected five of the six passengers...including Rockne...through the bottom of the fuselage.

By the time this photo, or any of the ones that follow, were taken, souvenir hunters had stripped the wrecked plane of just about everything that could be removed.

Investigators examine the inverted, mangled, and stripped cockpit of the plane. Souvenir hunters had removed just about everything that would have been helpful to the investigation, something that would absolutely not happen today.

Close-up of the area shown in the above photo.

Another angle of the crashed airliner, surrounded by area residents and investigators. You're looking towards the nose of the aircraft. The inverted tail is visible right mid-frame, between the guy in the light colored jacket, and another guy wearing gray pants, a black jacket, and a 'Newsboy' cap. The triangular structure visible between the two men is  the system of struts that supported the vertical and horizontal stabilizers

The detached right wing of the plane, sitting in the field about a quarter mile from the rest of the wreckage. The wing broke off a few feet outboard of the right engine nacelle, and fluttered down like a huge leaf, landing comparatively gently a quarter mile or so from the rest of the wreck. Note the number of  of people posing with and even sitting on the wing. 

*

The entirety of the State of Kansas, contrary to popular belief, is not an expanse of board-flat farmland.  A long, narrow swath of eastern Kansas is known as the Flint hills, named for both the gently rolling countryside, and the flint deposited on and near the surface by centuries of erosion. The area was, and is, however, mainly pasture land, and not all that heavily populated (In fact several of the small towns in that area had larger populations in 1931 than they do now.) The field that Flight 599 was had augered in to was smack dab in the middle of this region.

For being out in the middle of a sparsely populated, very rural area it's amazing just how many people either saw the plane in flight or witnessed the crash. Brothers Edward and Arthur Baker were moving cattle from one field to the other, crossing the road in front of their house when they heard the plane. The brothers were accompanied by two other young men by the names of Clarence Carpenter, and Clarence McCraken, who were assisting the Bakers by hauling feed, and both of them also heard the plane, first coming from the southwest, then from the northeast, obviously either circling or turning.

I can almost bet they commented on the pilot's actions, wondering if he was in trouble of some kind, possibly lost. When interviewed by investigators, they reported that the engines' note changed somewhat, possibly backfiring, before going silent just seconds before they heard a loud crash from across the road. They never reported seeing the spinning Fokker, but they definitely heard it hit, and when they heard that deadly thud, both of the Baker brothers spurred their horses into motion, galloping first across the road, then the field, riding hard for a bit over a mile before topping a small hill...on the other side they saw the shattered airliner, upside down and broken in two, one wing flat against the dirt of the field, the other ending just beyond the crushed right engine nacelle. The two boys looked around and one may have pointed to the north, asking the other 'What's that? The asked brother just may have replied 'Looks like the wing...' and sure enough, it did appear to be the missing wing, lying flat against the ground about a quarter mile to the north of the downed airliner

The two boys looked back around at the main wreckage to see the most gruesome sight of all, in front of the shattered craft...five bodies, thrown twenty or so feet ahead of the plane. All were lying in grotesque poses, something 'just not right' about the angles of heads and limbs. One of the boys possibly noticed the holes in the bottom of the plane, and put two and two together, possibly breathing a prayer when he realized just what had to have happened.

They trotted their horses closer to the crash, then reined the animals to a stop as the pungent odor of gasoline enveloped them, and both young men wondered why the plane wasn't a ball of fire, having burst into avgas-fueled flames as soon as it impacted the still semi-frozen ground.

The sudden realization that the aforementioned ball of fire could still occur...and that if it did, they would be smack dab in the middle of it...dawned on all of them all but simultaneously, and they wheeled their horses around, guiding them away from the crash. They also realized that they needed to let the authorities in on what was going on. Arthur told his brother and the other two boys to sit tight, and spurred his horse into a gallop, leaving them to watch the wreck as he rode hard back to their house. He quickly secured the horse, then ran inside, probably announcing that 'A plane just crashed across the road!' to whoever may have been at home before snatching up the phone and calling the Chase County Sheriff to report the crash. The sheriff would also notify the coroner.

An ambulance also responded (The only emergency vehicle that responded from what I gathered, probably from the county seat, Cottonwood Falls, about 12 miles north) and Arthur waited until he heard the ambulance screaming south on what's now Kansas Route 177, to remount his horse and saunter back across the road, arriving back at the scene about the time that the ambulance, followed closely by the sheriff and coroner's rides, bounced across the field towards the wrecked airliner. Their dad, along with a Deputy Sheriff, was also there, and Medical Examiner, Dr. A. E. Titus, who was a practicing Doctor in Cottonwood Falls, took charge of the scene. His main function was to identify and properly process the fatalities, and he quickly set to that task, detailing the two Baker boys to start looking through the deceased passengers' pockets to see if they could find any identification.

As Arthur and Edward Baker started the gruesome task of searching the bodies for ID, Dr. Titus, the sheriff, and the elder Baker began examining the wreck. The plane was upside down, with the fuselage broken into at least two pieces. The center engine was buried deep in a self-made crater, with the cockpit crushed almost back to the passenger cabin. Both pilot and copilot could be seen, still strapped into their seats and hanging upside down, trapped between the instrument panel and the rear cockpit bulkhead. They would also discover one of the passengers crushed in the wreckage of the forward end of the passenger cabin. Getting them out would not be fun.

But that, wasn't of course, the most earthshattering find of the next several minutes...that would come as one of the brothers searched the mangled body of a large, powerfully built man who, they noticed, was clutching a Rosary in his right hand so tightly that the cross was bent, and pulled a wallet out of his coat pocket. When he opened the wallet, and began looking for I.D, his eyes went wide...

The Baker brothers and their two friends weren't the only people who'd witnessed the airliner spinning in, not by a long shot, and as...or even before...the M.E., ambulance, and the Sheriff arrived on scene, other area residents were arriving. Therefore, there were at least ten or twelve additional people on scene already when one of the Baker brothers looked around, his eyes wide, and exclaimed...

'That football coach!..Knute Rockne...I think this is him!!' 

Dr. Titus and the Sheriff both walked over to the body and examined the ID...probably a drivers license...that young Baker had found, and made low exclamations of surprise. This crash had just gotten all kind of ways more complicated.

Making notifications wasn't anywhere near as straight forward in 1931 as it would be even two decades later. Very few emergency vehicles had police radio receivers much less two way radio (And to even have those, the locality had to have a police or fire radio system, something that few if any large cities, much less rural areas and small towns, boasted in 1931). On top of that, having a list of agencies to notify in the event of a plane crash, along with their phone numbers, was not a high priority item for police and sheriff's department dispatchers in the early 1930s

I have a feeling that Dr. Titus or the sheriff...or at any event, someone...standing in the cold in the middle of that field ascertained who owned the wrecked plane, and then they contacted TWA to inform them that one of their planes was down, and that there were fatalities, including the beloved coach.

That notification was probably still a bit round-about. They had to find a phone (Most likely the Baker house) and go through the operator to reach the nearest TWA office (Probably Wichita) so it could have been as much as a couple of hours after the crash before the world began learning what had happened. Officially at any rate.

You have to understand a bit about how small towns work to even begin to understand how fast news travels in a rural community.  One of the area residents who was on scene went home...or sent someone home...to make a phone call, and soon an unofficial but very efficient 'Phone Tree' was in action. Hours before TWA got the official notification of the crash, the word that a plane had crashed, and the iconic and beloved coach Knute Rockne had been on board and was now lying dead at the scene, was buzzing across Chase County phone lines. 

And yes, many people didn't have phones. No problem. The news was simply delivered in person. 

It wouldn't surprise me if the tiny hamlet of Bazaar didn't all but empty as people fell upon the scene. They came to pray and pay homage to the nation's fallen idol, right? Right??'

Ahh, no. They came to grab a souvenir of the event. Dr. Titus and the Bakers, along with the sheriff's deputy managed to keep the crowds off of the deceased, even as the M.E. started arranging their transport to Cottonwood Falls, so, unable to get a souvenir off of the bodies, the crowd did the next best thing. They began stripping the wreck.

Anything that could be removed and carried away was spirited away. The fuselage's steel tube frame was stripped of fabric, wicker airline seats ended up on front porches, six of the nine propeller blades were taken (The crowd had to literally dig several of them out of the ground), spark plugs were removed from the engines...you get the picture. You can also imagine the effect this would have on the investigation. But I'm getting ahead of myself here...

I find it interesting that the officials in nominal charge of the scene (Dr. Titus, the Sheriff, and his Deputy) apparently allowed the first arriving spectators (Lets call them what they were...lookee-loos) to just remove items at will. It's also interesting that all of these people knew that a celebrity death was involved well before any official notification was made, but not surprising, as I noted a couple of paragraphs above. That rural news network/information distribution system was and is absolutely fierce in it's efficiency!. 

Dr. Titus arranged for transport of the bodies to a funeral home in Cottonwood falls, and those first five bodies were on the way to the temporary morgue with-in a couple of hours of the crash, the bodies of Fry and Matthias, along with that of the one passenger still trapped in the wreckage, shortly thereafter. Of course, before those last three bodies were transported, they had to be removed from the wreckage with the assistance, apparently, of a wrecker and mechanic from Cottonwood Falls (Further damaging the airframe before it could be examined by investigators). These same mechanics were also given the job of keeping the wreckage safe from looters pending the arrival of investigators, but by the time this was done, it was already too late.

By 1 PM, all of the bodies were on the way to Cottonwood Falls, and the AP had word of the crash...and they had word of (But apparently not official confirmation of) Knute Rockne's death. By 1:30, news commentators were breaking into radio serials with 'Breaking News...Knute Rockne Dead In Plane Crash!!', and presses were rolling, printing 'EXTRA!!' editions of major newspapers, to be hawked by news boys shouting the iconic 'EXTRA!! EXTRA!! READ ALL ABOUT IT!!. By 2:00 or 2:30 PM, the nation was learning, en masse, of the beloved coach's death. 

A drawing illustrating the crash that appeared in several papers. While not completely accurate by any means, it still does a pretty good job of graphically illustrating just what happened. One huge inaccuracy that stands out instantly, however, is the missing wing...the Fokker lost it's right wing, not it's left.  Another is the location of Knute Rockne's body indicated in the drawing...the five victims who were ejected were all found ahead of the crashed airliner. 

One of the many, many headlines reporting Rockne's death the day after the crash. Bonnie Rockne is pictured on the right.
The story was front page news in papers world-wide.

Fake News is not a new thing! This was one of the theories about the cause of the crash that the media reported...it was, of course, entirely false. False theories such as this also caused the media and the public to push the Aeronautics Branch to release the findings of their investigation, and give them the official cause of the crash, which, in turn, ultimately led to the findings of all air crash investigations being made public three years later, in 1934.

Sadly, The general and unbreakable modern rule about withholding the names of victims until the next-of-kin are notified hadn't even been thought of yet, so Rockne's mom learned of her son's death within only a couple of hours of the crash by hearing a news bulletin about it on a Chicago radio station. She called the Chicago Tribune incognito to ask if the news was indeed, true, to be told that it was. Two of Rockne's sisters found out in a similar manner.

It'd be nice to think that Bonnie Rockne and the two youngest Rockne kids learned of their husband and father's death in a more 'gentle' (If notification of the death of a loved one can ever be 'gentle' ) manner, such as a compassionate phone call from Notre Dame's Father Mooney, or maybe a call from her mother-in-law (Though the extremely high cost of long distance phone calls back then makes the latter very unlikely)...but sadly, it's a good bet that Bonnie Rockne learned of her husband's death in the exact same way the majority of the nation learned of it...by hearing a news break about it on the radio. Notre Dame officials may have tried to notify her before she found out about it unofficially, but by the time Father Mooney, or someone from South Bend called her, she already knew.

Another friend of the Rocknes also tried to soften the blow...New York Newspaper executive Francis Wallace, a long-time friend of the Rocknes, was also vacationing in Miami, close to the Rockne Vacation Digs. He quickly made is way to the Rocknes' (Cottage? Apartment?) to find Bonnie and the kids in tears, and telegrams of condolence already piling up. Even sadder, the telegram that Rockne had sent from  K.C.'s airport just before he boarded his flight was on top of the stack.

These telegrams extending condolence and sympathy were very likely forwarded from South Bend, leading me to believe that Notre Dame officials had indeed tried to head off the brutal unofficial notification that Bonnie Rockne no doubt received. At least they tried.

The University also likely notified Jess Harper at his Kansas ranch, as he lived fairly close...within a hundred miles or so... to the scene, and asked him to officially identify the body, while Bonnie Rockne undoubtedly called Doc Nigro...who had been a close family friend for years...,told him of her husband's death, and asked him if he'd handle having the body shipped to South Bend, and start the process of funeral arrangements. I feel for all of them, especially Mrs. Rockne, who was having to do this and get her family back to South Bend while heartbroken and in the initial stages of grief and mourning.

So, by two or so at the latest, Bonnie Rockne was performing the myriad of tasks involved with shutting down the family's spring vacation, getting the two youngest kids packed amid tears and an inevitable barrage of unanswerable questions, and arranging for a long and sad trip north by train while both Jess Harper and Doc Nigro were driving towards Cottonwood Falls, and the nation was just beginning to roll into a week-long period of national mass-mourning the likes of which wouldn't be seen again for a decade and a half, at the death of Franklin D Roosevelt.

If travel had been as easy in 1931 as it is now, in 2023, the little Kansas towns of Bazaar and Cottonwood Falls, as well as the crash site, would have been absolutely mobbed with representatives of the Fourth Estate by nightfall of March 31st. As it was, a lot of traveling was done on that sad Tuesday. Jess Harper and Doc Nigro were probably both in Cottonwood Falls by suppertime or a bit later, and the official identification of the body...where a representative of the coroner's office asks if these were indeed the remains of Knute Rockne, and a Death Certificate is signed...had been made shortly thereafter.

While Jess Harper was taking care of that grim task, Doc Nigro was securing release of the body, and on the phone with railroads and funeral directors taking care of getting Knute Rockne home to South Bend, and getting a funeral arranged...and he apparently did an awesome job of it.

Normally, in cases of accidental deaths of this nature, the body(s) isn't/aren't released until a Coroner's Inquest is held, but the impression I get is an exception was allowed for Knute Rockne, because his body was aboard an Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad train enroute to Chicago by early the next morning...April 1st...at the very latest. It's also very possibly an express train at that, because it was pulling into the Dearborn Street station, in Chicago, by 7:45PM on April 1st.

This probably means that before Rockne's body headed northeast to Chicago, where it would need to go before going to South Bend, it was transported about 65 miles southwest, to Wichita, where the body was placed aboard the train. Keep in mind that before any of this was done, the body had to be embalmed and otherwise prepared for transport, a casket purchased, and arrangements made with a funeral parlor in South Bend. Also keep in mind travel by road was slower in 1931 by far than it is today. Many roads were still unpaved out in rural areas, and average speeds were on the order of 20-30 mph at the best, so an 100 mile trip was a good four hours by car.  That ride from Cottonwood Falls to Wichita likely took a good three hours.

While the Media may not have been present En Masse in Kansas, they were still managing to follow Rockne's progress northward and report on same, doing so accurately enough that a crowd estimated at around ten thousand people was waiting when the AT&SF train bearing 'Rock's body pulled into Chicago's Dearborn Street station.

1st Assistant Coach Heartley Anderson (Who would step in as Notre Dame's Head Coach) and assistant coach Jack Chevigny had made the 90 mile drive from South Bend To Chicago, and were awaiting the train's arrival, along with fifteen members of the Notre Dame Society of Chicago. Anderson is the one who slid the door to the baggage car open so the seventeen of them could transfer the casket to a truck.

A huge crowd surrounds Notre Dame assistant head coach Heartly Anderson, assistant coach Jack Chavigny, and the fifteen members of the Notre Dame Society of Chicago who were transferring Knute Rockne's flower-draped casket from the baggage car of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe passenger train that transported his body from Kansas to a truck for the short ride from Chicago's Dearborn Street Station to the New York Central station on Lasalle Street. Chicago cops had to assist by pushing the crowd back. A New York Central train would transport his body the just shy of one hundred miles to South Bend.

A crew of Chicago P.D. officers had to clear a path for them to do so. Sometime during the transfer, a floral blanket was draped over the casket, and as it shed petals during the transfer, members of the crowd would swoop in and scoop them up as keepsakes. Flash powder kept lighting the scene up in lightning-like bursts of light as the Press documented the scene for the next day's paper, and posterity. In several of the pictures, the two oldest Rockne boys...who had just missed getting to say 'good-bye' to their dad in Kansas City...were walking, solemn-faced, behind the casket.

The casket was loaded aboard the truck, which made a short, four block drive to the New York Central station on LaSalle Street, where it was loaded aboard another baggage car. The NYC train probably pulled out of the LaSalle Street station somewhere between 8:30 and 8:45, and would pull into South Bend's station at 11:08, to be met by another crowd of several thousand...a crowd that would have been bigger had the train been on time rather than nearly 20 minutes early. The crowds in both Chicago and especially South Bend were eerily reminiscent of the crowds awaiting the Irish's return, victorious, from National Championship games, but the emotions were the exact opposite.

In South Bend, a McGann Funeral Home hearse was awaiting the body, which was loaded and transported to the funeral home. Knute Rockne beat his wife and two younger children home by twelve hours, give or take an hour or two. Bonnie Rockne and the two younger children were still on a train, somewhere between Miami and South Bend, when her husband's and their dad's body was loaded onto the McGann hearse.

**

Officials...or at least individuals...at the crash scene didn't just stand on their laurels twiddling their thumbs as the deceased were transported to Cottonwood Falls and Knute Rockne made his final trip home.. All nature of activity was happening in that remote farm field. The important stuff just wasn't happening real quick. 

Department Of Commerce Aeronautics Board investigators and TWA officials both left Kansas City for Cottonwood Falls at about 2:30PM. It wasn't to be a fast trip. The weather was still nasty in K.C. when they left, so rather than flying, they drove, and that 100 miles and change trip on rural, often unpaved roads took them about four and a half hours, putting them in Cottonwood Falls at around 7PM.

 This was about the same time that Jess Harper and Doc Nigro rolled into town, which may explain the early release of Rockne's body. It was too late for the crew from the Aeronautics Board to do anything at the scene that night, but our investigators did get a few things accomplished...possibly approving the release of Knute Rockne's body, introducing themselves to the local constabulary, and gathering witness statements chief among them. They wouldn't make it out to the scene, however, until early the next morning,

When the Aeronautics Board investigators drove across the field towards the wrecked plane early on Wednesday, April 1st, they were hamstrung from the get-go. By the time they arrived, all of the bodies, of course, had been removed from the scene, and the public had enjoyed several hours of unrestricted access to the wreck, so all that was left was the twisted steel tube frame, the three engines, most of the instruments in the cockpit, and some tattered bits of fabric, along with the broken section of wing.

 On top of having much of their evidence purloined by souvenir seekers, our investigators were two strikes down, authority-to-act wise, with strike three coming in hot over the plate. Even though members of the Aeronautics Board were tasked with determining the causes of early air crashes, they had absolutely no authority to subpoena witnesses, demand that the crash scene be left as undisturbed as possible, or protect the wreckage from looters...in other words, any of the things that were needed to perform a thorough investigation.

 Despite these handicaps, they dived right in. The very first thing they very likely did was to take a walking-tour of the crash scene...and one of the first things they noticed was the baggage and mail bags scattered between the broken wing and the rest of the wreck, along with other bits and pieces of wreckage,  The mail, baggage, and bits of wreckage formed a long debris field spread and scattered along a curved path about 1900 feet long, connecting the intact (And unmolested) section of the broken right wing, and the rest of the plane. And, seeing all of that spilled baggage and mail, they rubbed their chins and said 'HMMMM...'

 After touring the crash site they needed to determine whether all three engines were, in fact, producing power when the Fokker augered in. This is still one of the very first things NTSB investigators check today when they arrive at a crash scene involving a prop-driven plane, and is one of the easiest determinations to make. If the propeller blades are bent opposite the direction of rotation, parallel with the propeller disk, the prop was turning and under power when it hit the ground. If one or two blades are bent at a 90 degree angle to the prop disc...parallel with the fuselage...and/or the other blades are intact, the prop wasn't turning under power when it hit. Of course, to make that determination, you have to actually have the propeller blades to examine.

Finding the Fokker's propeller blades was even more imperative to our investigators because they had already developed a theory, partially based on finding those mail bags and pieces of luggage between the broken wing section and the main wreckage. They figured that a broken prop blade on the right propeller had thrown the prop out of balance, and the resultant extreme vibration had broken the main wing spar, throwing the baggage compartment door open or even damaging the fuselage, while it was at it.. So finding the propeller from the starboard (right) engine was critical. One problem. They couldn't find any propeller blades. As in none of them. All nine blades from all three propellers were among the missing.

They couldn't even find the hub of the prop from the right engine (Even though the nut that secured the hub to the end of the crankshaft was in place), and this, in their minds, further confirmed the theory...the vibration that destroyed the wing spar and opened the baggage compartment also broke the propeller hub. They just needed to find the blades to prove it.

Going on the theory that the right prop had thrown a blade, a crew was sent out to search along the doomed trimotor's flight path, looking for the theoretically thrown blade (Or even blades). They did a lot of walking, and probably became intimately acquainted with that well known by-product of cattle-raising known as the 'Cow-Pie', but found no propeller blades...

Meanwhile, as our search team trudged through semi-frozen mud and learned to skirt cow-pies, the crew back at the wrecked plane had to return to Cottonwood Falls for the Coroners Inquest, where all eight deaths were determined to be caused by accident (It's likely the actual term used was 'Misadventure'), specifically, trauma inflicted through an air crash. While at the inquest, the broken blade theory was also raised and discussed. I have a feeling our investigators grabbed a quick lunch (And warded off a few dozen  questions) while they were in town before returning to the crash site early that afternoon, and immediately engaging in manual labor involving shovels, pry-bars and ultimately even horses.

 They examined the left engine first...it hadn't buried itself as deeply as the other two engines, and it's prop was, theoretically, more accessible, but...and this is a biggie...they couldn't find any of the blades from the left engine. They then dug the deeply buried center and starboard engines out of the ground...using a team of horses to roll the center engine up and out of the crater it had buried itself in.. ..and they could only find one or two of the blades from the center engine's prop.

By then it was getting late. And dark. And cold. They returned to Cottonwood Falls, writing out reports in longhand, grabbing supper, and likely sleeping like logs before returning to the scene on the morning of Thursday, April 2nd. They went right back to work, borrowing the same team of horses to roll the deeply buried right engine up and out of its crater. Digging deeply, they found all three of the blades from that prop, broken from the hub, and bent backwards at that. (But they still didn't find the hub) All three blades were accounted for, and the engine had, in fact, been shut down before it hit the ground (This would be found to be true of all three engines). The wing hadn't been destroyed by a broken propeller blade. They were back, it seems, to Square One

**

While the investigative team searched for answers in Kansas, the nation descended into a period of shared sorrow and mourning the likes of which it hadn't seen, possibly, since the assassination of Abe Lincoln. What made this shared grief even more remarkable was the fact that Rockne wasn't a renowned statesman or political leader, but was 'merely' a football coach. There was also another, equally if not even more important difference...not only was this grief shared, it was shared all but instantaneously, because everyone heard the news of Rockne's death all but simultaneously thanks to radio.

By the time Bonnie Rockne and all four Rockne kids arrived back in South Bend on Thursday, April 2nd, both the nation and the world had learned of her husband's death. Messages of sympathy and condolence were coming in from all sides, with condolences delivered from President Hoover, as well as the Governors of several states, and the municipal governments of most of the nations major cities.

Needless to say. almost all of the nation's major colleges sent heartfelt messages of sympathy...the great majority of their football coaches knew Rockne personally, and felt the loss as the loss of a good friend. Ditto many members of the Media, most especially sports writers and commentators. It wouldn't surprise me if either Notre Dame or McGann Funeral Home delegated someone to handle the task of receiving all of these messages, which arrived from all over the country as well as the world. This would have been an all day job for at least a couple of days, and would have been at least one thing that Bonnie Rockne didn't have to deal with.

Once she got home, Bonnie barely got to sit down and breath for a second, much less process her husband's death, before she was hit from all sides by both well-meaning friends and equally well-meaning officials from Notre Dame, who wanted to delay the funeral until the next week, when students had returned from Spring Break.

Mrs. Rockne was not even vaguely naïve or unintelligent, and she well knew that her husbands funeral could end up being a three ring circus, which was one thing she wanted to avoid at all costs. The sooner they could have the funeral, the less likely it would become a media circus. She succeeded, but barely...the funeral definitely became a media-run event, becoming sort of the prototype of the way the media handles the death of a major public figure right up to the present day...but I'm getting a little ahead of myself here.

  Among the first things Bonnie Rockne decided was that the funeral would take place at 3PM on the day before Easter, Saturday the 4th...two days away. She also decided that seating in the church...Notre Dame's Basilica Of The Sacred Heart...would be by invitation only. A list of who to invite was likely provided, and I can only imagine that the task of distributing invitations (Probably by telegram, given the tight time line) was delegated to the funeral home.

Imagine going through both bereavement as well as having to deal with all of the details of a funeral, such as asking friends to act a s pallbearers (Several of whose names would be almost as familiar to college football fans as Rockne himself), arranging for the church (This was eased considerably, as The Basilica Of The Sacred Heart was offered up as the venue for the funeral as soon as word of Rockne's death was received at Notre Dame) along with all of the other myriad 'I's that needed to be dotted and 'T's that needed to be crossed.

Floral arrangements for example. Floral arrangements began arriving at the Rockne home before Bonnie and the kids even returned from Florida, rolling in in such huge numbers that they quickly filled the house, and overflowed into the vacant lot next door. This, too, was likely handled, at least in part, by representatives from McGann Funeral Home.

 Media outlets, meanwhile, set up microphones in the front yard of the Rockne home so their on-air personalities could interview celebs arriving to pay their respects (Some things haven't changed in ninety-two or so years)...they didn't have long to wait, because a mass pilgrimage was in progress, with South Bend as the destination for several notable coaches, mayors, or other important figures of the era, including Norwegian Consul Olaf Berndts, from Chicago, sent by King Haaken VI of Norway as his personal representative.

Every train that rolled in to the South Bend station on Thursday night, all day Friday, and early Saturday carried at least a couple of well-known sports, entertainment, or political figures, all of whom called on Bonnie at the nearly brand new Rockne home at 1417 E. Wayne Ave., and all of them found a microphone shoved into their face as they walked up the walk towards the front door.. I can't help but wonder how many times a suggestion as to just where said microphones could be placed was made.

Bonnie Rockne was probably suffering from one of the grandest headaches of all-time as Friday, April 3rd dawned in South Bend, but by then all of her kids and a number of the 1930 Irish were in town, and they ran interference for her, keeping the Media off of her and out of the house, and doing whatever they could to ease her pain as much as possible. She, meanwhile, was having to deal with the mundane details of funeral preparation. As noted above, one of those details was asking her husband's friends if they would act as pallbearers, and also as noted, the names of many of those friends, such as Stanford's Coach 'Pop' Warner, Vanderbilt's Dan McGugin, USC's Howard Jones, and Pitt's Jock Sutherland....were almost as familiar to college football fans as Rockne himself.

While all of this was going on, McGann Funeral Home representatives (The funeral director was also a close friend of the Rocknes) arrived early Friday morning to set the house up for a wake. The casket arrived at a bit before ten, and would lie in state until 2PM on Saturday...an hour before the funeral.  The members of the 1930 team organized themselves into crews of two, who would switch off acting as an honor guard until the funeral.

Meanwhile, upstart new radio network Columbia Broadcast System began promoting a nationwide broadcast of the funeral, advertising the broadcast during commercial breaks in shows on the network. CBS actually had even bigger plans for the funeral broadcast...they intended to broadcast it to Chicago, and from there to both East and West coasts, where it would then be broadcast to Europe and Asia.

A CBS production crew arrived in South Bend late Friday or very early Saturday, with a remote truck and all of the equipment needed for the remote broadcast. The broadcast was to be narrated by well known CBS sports commentator Ted Husing, and had been advertised for the past two days, both in newspaper ads and on the air as 'An eloquent word-picture of the event as it unfolds'. 

They set up at the Basilica Of The Sacred Heart Church, on the Notre Dame campus, the morning of the funeral. Columbia didn't own the only microphone there that afternoon...Chicago's WGN had a reporter there, as did a local station, but Columbia (CBS) would be the only network to go live, nationwide and internationally.

At two o'clock on that chilly April afternoon, the pallbearers assembled at the Rockne home and carried the casket out to the hearse as over a hundred cars idled, pumping white clouds of exhaust into the afternoon chill, waiting to be given the 'Go' signal, their occupants talking Knute Rockne memories, and wondering if they'd ever get moving, and telling kids they had better behave themselves...

...And finally whistles tweeted, and cops waved them ahead with the exaggerated arm motions still utilized by traffic officers to this day, and the hearse and limos carrying the family started rolling, followed, one by one, by each and every car, making the slow solemn, three or so mile drive West on East Jefferson Street, then north on S Eddy Street, then a quick westward jog on Howard Street before swinging north on North Notre Dame Ave and finally, Holy Cross Ave's circuitous route around the west side of the Notre Dame campus before arriving at The Basilica Of The Sacred Heart.

The church, which was draped in black and white bunting and filled with even more flowers, seated 1400. and would be packed once all of the invited guests were seated. Everyone inside the church was there by invitation. Speakers had been set up outside the church so that the estimated 5000 mourners waiting outside could hear the service, Our on-air personalities were also waiting, of course, and as the motorcade rolled into sight, a silence enshrouded the scene, broken only by the tolling of the Basilica's bell and the low background rumble of the generators on the remote trucks.

 I can only imagine that the broadcasts started as soon as the hearse rolled up, and maybe even before, and it's a no-brainer that listeners were treated to a blow-by-blow description of the casket being removed from the hearse and carried into the church. At three o'clock on the button, as the funeral started, all the stores in South Bend closed, And the entire nation mourned along with those at the funeral as Ted Husing told a moving and descriptive tale.

The same microphones feeding the speakers outside the church were probably also tied into the national live feed, so that the national and international audience could hear the service itself. The first they heard from inside the church was the beautiful music performed by the Notre Dame Choir, then Notre Dame's President, The Rev. Charles L. O'Donnel's, moving eulogy, followed by the service itself, interspersed with solemn commentary by Ted Husing. It was said to be a heartfelt and moving service, and sadly, no recordings of it are known to survive.

After the service was over, the mourners formed yet another miles-long cortege as they motored out to Highland Cemetery, about five road-miles from the church, across the narrow St Joseph River. The entire route was lined with even more mourners. And, even as Knute Rockne was laid to rest, a somewhat macabre tradition...that of the nation sharing the mourning of a celebrity via electronic media...had begun.  The story of the crash, however, had just started.

The huge crowd of mourners outside Notre Dame's Basilica Of The Sacred Heart. There were 1400 or so inside the church, all there by invitation, and at least 5000 outside. Speakers outside the church allowed those outside to hear the service.

Then-brand new radio network Columbia Broadcast System... CBS...broadcast Knute Rockne's funeral live both nationally and internationally, one of the very first times this had ever been done...note the remote truck on the far left of the frame.. Those same speakers that allowed mourners outside to hear the service were also probably hooked into the CBS live broadcast so listeners could also hear the service, interspersed by solemn commentary by well known sportscaster Ted Husing.

Mourners at Highland Cemetery as Knute Rockne is laid to rest.

 

As Knute Rockne was mourned and laid to rest, the investigative team was still confounded by the cause of the crash that had killed him. They had ruled out the broken propeller as a cause, even, as with the help of the Chase County Sheriff, they found all of the missing propeller blades at various homes in the area, one of them mounted over the couch in the, er, collector's living room. The blades were returned over the course of two days...April 2nd and 3rd.

By the time these blades were found, of course, a broken prop blade had been ruled out as the cause of the broken wing spar. Witnesses had said that, immediately after the plane crashed, several 'C' shaped chunks of ice were noted near the wings, so the next question was 'Could icing have caused the wing to fail, either directly or indirectly? Several other pilots had reported encountering icing...some of it severe...in the same general area as the crash, reports that strengthened that theory considerably.

Lets take a a quick look at these 'C' shaped chunks of ice. The reason these chunks of ice were 'C' shaped was that the ice had formed around the leading edges of the wings, so the weight of the ice could have snapped the wing spar,...but for that to have happened, it would have had to have been a huge quantity of ice, enough that it would have brought the plane down by degrading the wing's lift-producing capability long before the weight of the ice caused the wing to fail. In other words, long before the wing suffered a structural failure, the ice build-up would've altered the shape of the wing to the point that it stopped producing lift, and the plane, essentially, would've became an anvil and simply fallen from the sky. But had this happened, the wings would have been intact and, well, they weren't. So no, the ice on the wings didn't cause the crash.

Far more likely, in the minds of the investigators, was a sudden extreme maneuver causing the wing loading to exceed the spar's load limits. If the wings had iced up, the pitot tubes that provided vacuum to power the flight instruments could also have iced up. And if that happened, Bob Fry and Jess Mathias would've lost their airspeed indicator, their vertical speed indicator, which told them how fast they were climbing or descending, and their attitude indicator...often called the 'turn and bank' indicator...which told them if they were climbing, flying level, or descending, as well as whether their wings were level, and whether they were turning or not.

Basically, if they lost their flight instruments, they lost their ability to fly blind. They could have been in a fairly steep dive and not realized it until they suddenly broke out of the clouds, seemingly so close to the ground that they could touch it, and one or both of the pilots may have performed an all but intuitive act of preservation...yanked back hard on the control yoke to get the nose up, and most importantly, pointed back towards the sky rather than the ground This sudden maneuver, which the wing structure was not designed for, could have absolutely snapped the wing spar, even if it hadn't been water-damaged. The added weight of ice on the wings would have added even more stress to the over-taxed...and water-damaged...wing spar.

Then there was the Fokker F-10's tendency to suffer from wing flutter at higher speeds during rough weather...a tendency that TWA's pilots discussed regularly among themselves, and which scared the hell out of them...but which they were reluctant to discuss with TWA's executive staff for fear of loosing their jobs. TWA's flight crews were actually terrified of the F-10 for that very reason.

In short, there were several theories as to just why the F-10's wing departed the aircraft, and, once the propeller theory was disproved, no one was even vaguely close to figuring out just which possibility was the actual culprit.

While all of this pondering and conjecturing was going on, there was still a lot of physical labor being expended at the crash site. The first thing that happened after the investigative team arrived, toured, and I can only assume photographed the site, or at least made a map of the scene showing the location of the wreckage, was to gather the bags of mail, and send them to the Post Office in Wichita aboard a truck.

Next the broken wing section was dragged closer to the main wreckage...this was done a couple of days after the crash, probably using the same over-worked team of horses that was used to flip the engines out of their self-dug craters. And finally, towards the end of the week, the remains of the plane were loaded aboard a couple of big trucks, covered with tarps, and transported to an hanger at Wichita's airport, where they could be examined in more comfort and security. Thing is, they were well on the way to figuring out the actual cause, they just didn't know it yet.

On April 2nd, before the wreckage was moved to Wichita, Anthony Fokker himself flew out to the scene, landing in the field next to the wreckage. The wing section had been moved closer to the main wreckage by that point, but the first place he went was the original resting place of the wing. He found exactly what he was looking for...part of the front wing spar, and some pieces of wing sheathing, all of which showed evidence of tension fractures.

Then he walked back to the wreck, and started examining the broken ends of the main spar...he didn't like what he saw. At All. He had a three foot length of the spar sawed off, so it could be examined more closely...it was after this that the rest of the wreckage was trucked to Wichita.

It was during this phase of the investigation that they discovered that the laminated plywood construction of the main spar had delaminated...the layers separating...which, of course, had weakened it greatly. The wing had been a ticking time bomb for who knows how long before it finally failed. Every passenger who'd survived a flight aboard Fokker F-10 NC999E for weeks prior to March 31, '31; every flight crew who'd shut down and walked into the terminal to finish paperwork and grab coffee, had a guardian angel flying with them.

The broken spar was the primary cause of the wing's failure, with the weather being the primary contributing factor. The spar would have ultimately weakened enough to just let go during a silk-smooth flight in clear, beautiful weather (What pilots call CAVU...Ceiling And Visibility Unlimited...weather), but the severe turbulence during the storm they were flying through, not to mention the wing flutter caused by said turbulence, definitely accelerated the process.

It was equally apparent, after some examination, that the reason the layers were delaminating was water damage,...moisture was getting inside the wing, infiltrating the laminated layers, and dissolving the glue that was holding the layers together. Something that occurred, again, over a period of weeks or even months. They would never know just which maneuver, or series of maneuvers, actually finished the wing off, but it was academic...the wing had failed during maneuvering while flying through the storm.  And that maneuver hadn't needed to be, and almost definitely wasn't, as extreme as the pull-out from a sudden dive mentioned above. It could have well been, and likely was, something as simple as one last sudden sharp up-and down jolt of turbulence.

That wing was going to fail, no matter what. It just picked that particular date, time, and place to do so. They had their cause, and could close the boo...

Wait... you guys really don't think that was the end of the story, do ya? Because it wasn't even close. The crash brought about changes in aviation that resonate to this very day.

Among the very first things that happened upon discovery of the wing spar's disturbing habit of collecting moisture and coming apart was the grounding of every Fokker F-10 in the air. On May 4, 1931...just over a month after the crash...the Aeronautics Board of the Department of Commerce mandated that every Fokker F-10 be taken out of service until their main wing spars could be inspected for similar delamination.

This was a huge problem for the infant airline industry, considering that F-10s made up a considerable percentage of the airliners then in service. And these inspections would not be a quick, easy, look-see, either. Unlike today's aircraft...or even slightly more modern aircraft then in service, such as the Ford Trimotor, and much more modern aircraft soon to be in service, such as the DC-3, the Fokker F-10 didn't have removable inspection plates that allowed maintenance personnel to look inside the wings and inspect the structure. Inspecting the spars and struts on the F-10 required very literally taking the wings apart. And if delamination was found, it would require all but completely rebuilding the wing, at considerable expense, not only direct expense of the repair itself, but lost revenue that the aircraft wouldn't be earning while out of service.. 

The loss of one of the primary types of airliner in service at that time would take a huge bite out of the revenue streams of American Airways, Universal Airlines, Pan Am, and most particularly, TWA. TWA most particularly because they were getting hit with a double-whammy. TWA, after all, was seen as the airline that killed Knute Rockne. and this was before the public found out the actual cause of the crash. If they found out the cause.

Wait, I hear ya say. What do ya mean 'IF'??

Quick coin-pocket history lesson. When the Aeronautics Board of the Department Of Commerce was created in 1926, they were tasked with both regulating aviation in order to make it as safe as possible, as well as promoting aviation, in order to make it as profitable as possible for both aircraft manufacturers and airlines. It was all but inevitable that these two tasks would go head to head occasionally.

One of the tasks assigned to the regulatory side of the Branch was the investigation of, and hopefully finding the causes of aircraft accidents so that lessons learned from these accidents could be applied towards preventing future crashes. While they were at it, they were also required to make the causes of these crashes public. 

And here we see the afore mentioned 'The Board's Two Legislated Tasks Often Clashed' thing in action.

The airlines all but revolted at the thought of accident causes being made public, saying that if the general public knew why their planes were falling out of the sky, they'd never fly again,. The Aeronautics Branch, also tasked with promoting commercial aviation, agreed with them, even though they were, in fact, mandated by Federal law to release the causes of these same crashes to the public.

The Aeronautics Board came up with a slick little work-around, though...They would release statistics showing the various causes of air crashes on a twice-yearly basis, said table of statistics to be published in major news papers and magazines twice annually...probably mid-year and at the end of the year.  Lawmakers looked and searched, and head-scratched, and realized that the A.B could do just that and get by with it. This information was passed on to the representatives of The Fourth Estate...and all was not well with their world.

The media dutifully published the tables of statistics, sulking the whole way (And pushing for change while they were at it) while most of the honorable members of Congress pushed for change as well. This clash between regulation and promotion began to come to a head in 1929, when a T.A.T. (Transcontinental Air Transport) Ford Trimotor named City of San Francisco slammed into the side of Mount Taylor, near Grants, New Mexico, in inclement weather, killing eight.

New Mexico's Senator Bratton took particular interest in the crash, and a spirited debate, vis-à-vis making the results of the investigation public, ensued. From what I understand it got real spirited, as well as complicated, as Senator Bratton also wanted to transfer the Branch's investigative function to the Interstate Commerce Commission, directing the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce to investigate all previous fatal air carrier accidents.

Like I noted above, it got real complicated and I'm not even going to pretend to go into all of it. Lets just say that Senator Bratton was facing un uphill battle on an icy road, because everyone else wanted the Aeronautics Branch, and their investigations, to stay where they were. Part of this is understandable, as the ICC wasn't prepared to take over the regulatory functions being handled by the Aeronautics Branch.

The thing is, though, the I.C.C. had been investigating rail accidents since 1912, so they were well versed in accident investigation. Also, while the A.B hadn't been granted the power to issue subpoenas or protect crash sites, among other powers, and their members weren't protected from lawsuits arising from their findings, the members of the I.C.C. had such powers and protections...at least while investigating rail accidents. 

The big question everyone was asking, then, was whether or not the I.C.C.'s powers and protections would also cover them in the investigation of air crashes. The I.C.C. actually had absolutely no desire to find out, and, for the time-being, wanted absolutely nothing to do with air crash investigations...train wrecks were keeping them quite busy enough.at any rate, thank you just the same.

While all of that was being hashed out, the Aeronautics Board hung on to their policy of not revealing the causes of crashes publicly. Tightly.

A month or so later, the senate again took up the subject of releasing crash investigation results, when Tennessee Senator  Kenneth McKellor proposed a resolution calling for the release of information about a crash in Memphis. Senator Bratton added an amendment calling for release of info concerning the City of San Francisco crash and joined him in battle. This time they got results. Sort of.

About a month or so after the resolution was proposed, the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce, after some discussion, agreed to the resolution, and the Aeronautics Board was forced to release information on those two crashes. Senator Braxton proposed legislation that would allow for the subpoenaing of witnesses and the protection of evidence...legislation that was proposed but not yet passed when TWA Flight 599 crashed.

And so the battle to release info on all crashes still quietly raged, with the aviation industry still solidly on the 'Keep The Results Secret' side of things, an opinion noted very strongly in several aviation trade magazines. Meanwhile, the media continued their fight on the other side of the cause, with the Christian Science Monitor publishing a very passionate article for public release in their January 4, 1930 issue. It wasn't a decision that would be made quickly or easily. Or even peacefully.

There were reports of airline personnel threatening photographers while 'confiscating' cameras and removing film at the scene of a crash that was fatal to seven in Alexandria, Va. While they were at it, they removed almost all traces of the crashed and burned airliner with-in well under 24 hours of the crash. This was early in 1930, with-in a couple of weeks of a Maddux Airlines Ford Trimotor crash that killed 16, and interestingly, one Senator Bingham, who had been solidly against releasing crash cause information, was suddenly solidly for it, calling for the release of info about both crashes.

The debate got more heated...and the policy of non-disclosure harder to defend...when it was discovered that the A.B. was releasing the causes of crashes to aircraft manufacturers and airlines, but not to the families of victims. Annnnd...the policy still wasn't amended, and the A.B. still refused to publicly release reports (The City of San Francisco report was released to the members of Congress, but not publicly...) The main sticking point was legalities...the A.B absolutely did not want the reports to be used as evidence in any lawsuits if and when the families of deceased passengers filed suit against the airline and/or the aircraft manufacturer, nor did they themselves want to be the subject of lawsuits filed against them by the airlines due to loss of business caused by public release of accident causes.

  The debate over public release of investigation results is chock full of details and debates and battles that are far far beyond the scope of this blog, however these debates did result in the drafting and passage of Senate Resolution 206, which required the Department of Commerce to release the causes of all aircraft mishaps between May 20, 1926 and May 16 1930.

Again, the requested info was released to Congress, not to the public. There was very little action or debate on the subject between May of 1930, and March of 1931.1930 had been an extraordinarily safe year for commercial aviation, taking the debate out of the public consciousness, if for no other reason, because there were fewer crashes for the Press to report on.

But the Public was still beginning to make a few waves, even as things quieted down on the debate-front. Remember that T.A.T crash in New Mexico a couple of years earlier? It got national attention when it occurred, and the Press kept it in public view for several days...not that doing so got the cause of the crash released publicly (Remember, only Congress got to see those results). But the public...flying and non-flying...remembered it. Eight people dying in an air crash in the late 1920s was the emotional and visceral equivalent of ten times that number dying in a crash occurring in 2023.

Then came the Maddux Ford Trimotor crash, which was the deadliest air crash in U.S. history up to that time, and again, only Congress got to see the cause of the crash. despite outcry from the public and the Media alike,  The A.B. hung on to their policy of secrecy like a ball-carrier heading for the goal line. Well, that 'Ball Carrier' was about to be tackled. By a Fokker F-10 as it slammed into a Kansas cow pasture. On March 31st, 1931, the props got kicked out from under the A.B.s policy of secrecy in a big way.

As I noted further up, the crash was huge news for nearly a week, with every major paper and many smaller ones carrying stories of the crash as well as Rockne's biography, stories of his coaching prowness, stories of how he was a mentor to his players, tributes from friends and family...and editorials pretty much demanding that the Aeronautics Board release the cause of the crash. Knute Rockne was about as close to royalty as the U.S. could offer in that era, and Rockne's millions of fans wanted answers as to why he died far too soon. And they wanted them now!!'

This time the A.B. caved practically without a fight, releasing a press release on April 3rd, naming the broken propeller...that actually didn't happen...as the culprit.  

So this brought forth both another problem and another first...the first official press release by the A.B was closely followed by the first retraction. Well known Aviation journalist Wiley Post, who had also widely reported the broken propeller as the cause of the crash, published his own retraction, now known as the 'Eating Crow' story. 

A few days later the A.B published what is still the official cause of the crash...a combination of turbulence, icing, and the weakened wing spar, coupled with the F-10's tendency towards wing flutter, brought Flight 599 down. 

While the cause of Flight 599's crash was made public, it would be another three years...June 1934...before amendments to the Air Commerce Act of 1926 (The law that created the Aeronautics Board in the first place) gave the board both the powers and protections it had been seeking, transferring air crash investigation to the I.C.C. while they were at it. These same amendments mandated full public disclosure of investigation results, ultimately leading to the full public access to full NTSB accident reports we have today.

**

Of course that wasn't the only...or the biggest...change resulting from the crash. One of the legacies of Knute Rockne's death is the modern airliner. The crash all but ended the Fokker F-10's...And any other wooden-winged airliner's... use by any airline operating in the U.S. While we're at it, bad publicity from the crash also came real close to ending TWA, long before they became 'Trans-World'.

The F-10 didn't go away immediately, but it definitely disappeared from the air for several months after the crash, as airlines went through the rigmarole and expense of having the suspect wing spars inspected. American Airways (American Airlines' predecessor) still had several in service, as did a couple of other airlines, but the public likely didn't trust the airplane. And I can just about bet that TWA never put another passenger on one of the planes.

All of the airlines (And their potential customers) were clamoring for sturdier, and safer, all metal aircraft. The Ford Trimotor, though very slightly slower and less capable, payload-wise, than the F-10, was not only all metal, it was built like a tank and quickly gained a reputation for ruggedness and reliability. TWA already had a fleet of them, and likely bought a few more as their F-10s either languished in the far corners of airfields or were sold off.

Restored Ford Trimotor in Transcontinental Air Transport (T.A.T.) livery. The Fokker Tri-Motor predated the Ford by about three years, both aircraft being developed in the mid to late 1920s, and it's pretty well established that Henry Ford based the Ford Trimotor on the Fokker. One big difference, though...the Ford Trimotor was all metal and built like a tank. Several are not only still around, but also still flying, all on the airshow/exhibition circuit. 

Quite a few of the 199 built were still in the air right on up to the mid 1960s, and during the 1950s quite a few of the rugged craft were used by 'Smoke-Jumpers...airborne forest firefighters who parachuted in to the scene.

Ford Motor Company never made a huge profit on the Trimotor, but I have a feeling more than a few of the 199 Ford Trimotors built were purchased during the short span of time between Flight 599's fatal plunge, and the introduction of more modern airliners. FoMoCo even designed and built (But never flew) a prototype for a 4 engine, 32 passenger airliner. It was a beast, and had it had a few more features (Like retractable landing gear and variable pitch propellers, both of which would have given it a faster cruising speed.) it very well could have been successful.  As designed, however, it was already outdated before the first rivet was driven. And once the planes I'm about to profile took to the skies, the Ford Trimotor didn't stand a chance.

What the airlines (And the passengers) wanted was not only a safer all-metal airliner, they wanted a more advanced, far faster, far more comfortable, safer all metal airliner. Add to those wants, the airlines' requirement for a safe, fast, technically advanced all metal airliner that could turn a profit on every flight.

Curtiss Aircraft was actually the first to throw a hat into the modern airliner ring...well, sort of...with the Curtis T-32 Condor. The Condor was a trim, twin engine, steel tube frame, fabric covered 15 passenger biplane with a range of 850 miles. Thing is, it was already out-dated before the first one was ever delivered.

Both Eastern and American...the plane's two primary U.S. users...claimed a cruising speed of 167 MPH and a top speed of 190 MPH, but with all those struts and wires connecting and bracing the two wings, the plane, according to one aviation historian, 'had it's own built-in headwind', and the cruising speed was probably more like 120-130 MPH, with a top speed in the 140-150 MPH range...not much faster than either the Fokker F-10 or the Ford Trimotor.

 The Condor was comfortable, though, with a cabin configuration...rows of four seats, with two seats on either side of a center aisle, with rest-room (Far larger than todays inflight restrooms) and stewardess service area at the rear of the cabin....that would be familiar to modern air travelers.

The cabin was also huge in comparison to the Ford Trimotor's cabin, and even better, the seats could be converted to berths for overnight flights. Thanks to that big, comfortable sleeper-cabin, the plane was popular with travelers despite being slower than advertised.

Curtiss T-32 Condor...Though this is actually one of the two Navy Condors, designated an R4C-1, externally it's essentially identical to the civilian airliners. The plane had steel tube fuselage and wing construction, but was fabric covered. It had an actual cruise speed of around 120 or so MPH, and had a range of 716 miles, but was only in service with the airlines for about three years.

 Both of the Navy's Condors...including the one pictured...were used by Admiral Byrd's 1933 Antarctic Expedition, and both were abandoned after being used to explore over 450,000 square miles of territory. The remains of both aircraft are, presumably, still down there, somewhere.

There are no intact Condors in existence. 

Though not exactly blazing fast, the Condor was, comfortable, safe, and was also, IMHO, a truly good looking bird, especially in the air with it's retractable landing gear tucked up into the wheel wells...I believe the Condor was the first airliner with retractable gear.

 The Condor first flew in January 1933, and Curtis already had several orders in hand before the first bird took to the sky. American Airways snapped up nine of them, as did Eastern, with several other, foreign, carriers also ordering planes. The Condor would only be in service in the U.S. for about three years, and once American and Eastern replaced them with the next two planes I'm going to profile, several foreign airlines bought two or three apiece, so some were still flying on the other side of 'The Pond' for a decade or so after being replaced here in the U.S.

The Army and Navy also bought a pair of aircraft apiece, the Army Air Core designating it as the YC-30, and using it as an executive transport, and the Navy designating it the R4C-1, and also using it as a transport for big-wigs. Both of the Navy's were used by Admiral Byrd's 1933 Antarctic Expedition. Both were abandoned in Antarctica after the expedition, and the remains of both, likely buried beneath dozens of yards of snow, are presumably still down there...somewhere.

Several, all exported, were even built as bombers, with internal bomb bays, and machine guns mounted in nose and dorsal turrets. Unknown of any of these ever saw combat.

Curtis ended up building 45 Condors., but those two wings and the fabric covering kind of put it at a disadvantage, as well as marking it as an outdated design. The public and the airlines both wanted something even more modern. And faster. Definitely faster. They didn't have long to wait.

Next into the fray was the Boeing Model 247. The 247 was an all metal, low wing monoplane with retractable landing gear and the capability of carrying 10 passengers. It was far faster than the Condor, with a 189 MPH cruise speed, and a slightly longer, 745 mile range. The first one flew in February of 1933 (The Condor beat it into the air by a month). The Condor, though slow, was actually the more capable aircraft, payload-wise. The 247's cabin only seated 10, with five rows of two seats, each row consisting of one seat on either side of a center aisle. The cabin also had the main wing spar running through it, so a trip to the loo for the passengers in the forward end of the cabin also involved stepping across the wing spar.

The Seattle, Washington 'Museum of Flight's immaculately restored Boeing 247 making it's final landing at Seattle's Boeing Field before being added, permanently, to the museum's static displays. The restored 247 wears period United Airlines livery.

The Boeing 247 is widely considered to be the first modern airliner, with all-metal construction, variable-pitch propellers, retractable landing gear, and a cruising speed just shy of 190MPH.

The 247 still had a few flaws, though...the main spar passed trough the cabin, forcing passengers to step over it, and the plane only seated ten passengers. It's biggest flaw? It couldn't make a profit just flying passengers...it had to also carry either mail or freight to make money.

The same bird pictured above, on the ground so it's easier to see the layout of the cabin and cockpit in relation to the wing.

As I noted above and in the main body of the post, the main wing spar passes through the cabin, forcing passengers to step across it if they're, say, heading for the toilet in the rear of the cabin. The cockpit sits considerably higher than the passenger cabin.

This 247 has the forward slanted windshield originally installed on the planes, but pilots reported problems with ground lights reflecting off of the windshield, so later variants were equipped with a more conventional back-slanted wind screen.

Still, Boeing already had orders for 60 of the birds in hand before the first piece of sheet metal was bent, but it was an easy sell. Interesting thing about airlines during that era...several of the big ones were actually owned by aircraft manufacturers, and Boeing Air Express...soon to become United Airlines...was one of them. TWA, desperate for newer and more modern airliners, put in orders for the 247 as well, but those orders were, well, delayed, as Boeing advised them that they couldn't fill any other orders until they built all 60 of B.A.E, soon-to-be United's planes.. ( Boeing did sell a very few to other airlines...they only built 75 247s in total.) 

I don't know why TWA didn't go with the Condor...it was already developed and abuilding, and Curtis would have likely welcomed the orders, as they weren't beholden at any airline...but, well, they didn't.

 They did however, write their own specs for a new airliner, and farmed them out to five different aircraft manufacturers. TWA's original spec sheet called for an all metal, three engine monoplane with an 800 mile range, 150 MPH cruise speed, and retractable gear. OH...and it had to be able to take off from any airport served by TWA (Albuquerque in particular) with one engine shut down.

The owner of one of the five manufacturers...Donald Douglas of Douglas Aircraft Corp....was reluctant, at first, to bid on the specs because he wasn't sure they could get the one hundred orders necessary to recoup development costs of the yet-undersigned new aircraft. It took a few meetings with his design team and TWA brass before he decided to have a go at it, and on top of that, to meet and exceed the specifications with only two engines.

The designers came up with a low wing, all metal, twin engine monoplane featuring retractable gear, variable pitch propellers, deicer boots for wings and horizontal/vertical stabilizers, and sturdy, robust yet lightweight monocoque construction throughout. The plane could seat 12 passengers in a heated, insulated cabin featuring an onboard toilet and a small galley for the preparation of inflight meals. OH...and the main wing spar passed through the fuselage beneath the cabin floor.  It was to be designated the DC-1 for Douglas Commercial Model One

The plane rolled out in July of 1933, and was put through a rigorous five month test period where it exceeded every specification, with a cruise speed of 190MPH, a service ceiling of 23,000 feet, a range of 1000 miles, and the ability to cheerfully climb out of any airport on TWA's routes, fully loaded, with only one fan turning.

TWA accepted the plane in December of 1933, and immediately ordered 30 more, with slight changes...the fuselage was stretched about two feet, more powerful engines were installed, and two more seats were added, allowing the plane to carry fourteen passengers...big enough changes for Douglas to consider it a new airplane, designated the DC-2

TWA took delivery of the first DC-2 in May of 1934, and by the end of the year the type was flying on every TWA route. The DC-2's cruising speed and range were identical to the DC-1's, and it could carry two more passengers, and most importantly, be profitable by simply carrying passengers. Any mail or freight it carried was simply extra profit.

Other airlines took note as well, Eastern and American both ordered ten of them, and Pan-Am bought sixteen. Several foreign carriers also bought DC-2s. A goodly percentage of the 198 aircraft built went to the U.S. Army Air Corps, as the C-33, and the U.S. Navy and Marines as the R2D.

Douglas only built 198 DC-2s (One fewer than the total number of Ford Tri-motors built) but the DC-2 didn't end production because it was unpopular...on the contrary, airlines loved the big bird...they wanted more, so Douglas gave them just that, and birthed an aviation icon while they were at it.

Restored Douglas DC-2, in TWA (Transcontinental and Western Air at the time.) livery. TWA was the DC-2's introductory customer, as well as the line that asked that the new aircraft be developed. Douglas hit it slam out of the park with the new plane. The DC-2 was an all metal monoplane featuring rugged, all metal, monocoque construction, retractable landing hear, variable pitch propellers, and a 14 passenger seating capacity  The plane was legitimately fast, with a 190MPH cruise speed, and was comfortable, seating those 14 passengers in a wide, insulated, heated cabin featuring an on-board toilet and a galley for the preparation of in-flight meals. It also had an important safety margin, being able to cheerfully climb out of any airport on TWA's route, fully loaded, on one engine. Most importantly, the plane could make a profit just by carrying passengers...the very first airliner able to do so.

American Airlines' president called Don Douglas, asking about converting the DC-2 to a sleeper aircraft, with seats that could be converted to berths for overnight flights. They wanted the new planes to replace their Curtiss Condors. Douglas was, again, a bit reluctant until American's president guaranteed him 20 orders.

Slide-rule work was carried out, chins were rubbed meaningfully, and the DC-2's fuselage was stretched another three feet and the cabin widened by 29 inches, to 95 inches. The wingspan was increased to 95 feet, larger engines installed, and they, again, had a brand new airplane...the DC-3

The plane would carry 16 passengers as a sleeper, with seats that converted to berths, and 21 as a conventional airliner, with seven rows of three seats...two on the left side and one on the right of a center aisle. It would cruise at 207 MPH, had the same 1000 mile range as the DC-2, and had a service ceiling of 23,000 feet. Like the DC-2, that 1000 mile range gave it the capability of flying cross country with just two refueling stops, and its high cruising speed made that trip an 18 hour journey, even with the gas stops.

The first twenty or so, for American Airlines, were designated as Douglas Sleeper Transports, but pretty much all of the rest of the 607 DC-3s built were the 21 passenger airliners. They quickly gained a reputation for being reliable, rugged, comfortable, and, for that era, fast, and were beloved by crews and passengers...and the airlines...alike.

A restored Douglas DC-3 in period United Airlines livery. The DC-3 came into being when American Airlines requested than Douglas develop a sleeper version of the DC-2. So Douglas engineers and designers rubbed chins and manipulated slide rules and realized that the new plane, .with a stretched, widened cabin, longer wing-span, and more powerful engines would be an entirely different aircraft, which they designated the DC-3

American Airlines took delivery of 20 of the Skysleepers, which could seat...and sleep...16, but most of the over 600 built were 21 passenger day-liners. The DC-3 not only carried more passengers than it's little sister, it carried them faster, with a cruise speed of 207 MPH, and a range of 1000 miles, which allowed it to fly from LA to New York in 18 hours, with just two refueling stops. The DC-3 was the most popular airliner of the late '30s and the 1940s. Every major airline had a fleet of them, and if you flew anywhere, it would most likely be aboard a DC-3

The DC-3 was already fast becoming a legend when the US was plunged into World War II...during the war over 11,000 C-47s...the Army Air Force version of the DC-3...and R4Ds...the Navy variant...rolled off of assembly lines, to fly in every theater of the war, carrying anything that could be loaded into the thirty or so foot long cargo bay into often unimproved landing strips. They also proved themselves able to withstand loads of punishment, often bringing their crews home with horrendous damage.

The DC-3 quickly gained the status of an aviation icon, and after the war, with thousands sold as surplus, they were snapped up by smaller airlines, converted to civilian airliners, and continued in revenue service for decades.

Just shy of two hundred of the iconic birds are still flying, though none are in scheduled passenger service. It's highly likely, though, that, when 2036 rolls around, there'll be a couple of century old DC-3s still flying.

Pretty much every major airline, including United, had a fleet of them, and the DC-3 was the most popular civil airliner in the air by the end of 1936, and was well on the way to becoming somewhat of a legend...

...And then we had a little dust-up sometimes known as World War II, during which over 11,000 C-47s...the military variant of the DC-3 airframe...were built and utilized as transports, cargo carriers, glider tow planes, jump-planes for paratroopers...pretty much anything that involved carrying people or cargo, often into rough, unimproved landing strips.

 Thousands of them were surplus after World War II, and Douglas Aircraft, as well as a couple of smaller companies, made a mint by converting them to civilian spec...installing airliner-grade interiors, and otherwise upgrading them...and selling them to smaller airlines.

The DC-3 went from legend to icon, becoming the basis for our modern airliners, and is still around today with just shy of two hundred of them still in service, though none are in regular scheduled passenger service. It wouldn't surprise me, though, if when 2036 rolls around, there aren't a couple of century old DC-3s still in the air.

The loss of Knute Rockne was a huge blow to the sports world in 1931, and devastated his team, and of course, his family., and the crash in which he died devastated seven more families, but at the same time the crash started the process that lead to both the present day public transparency in air crash investigation reporting and, even more importantly, the safe and reliable aircraft that we travel on today.

So, as tragic as Knute Rockne's death, and the passing of his fellow passengers and the two pilots was, at least they didn't die in vain.

A Quick Look At The Movies

The Spirit of Notre Dame

If we're going to look at the crash that took Knute Rockne's life, we also need to, briefly, take a look at the movie that 'The Rock' was on the way to L.A. to act as Technical Consultant for.

The Spirit of Notre Dame was a fictionalized look at The Fighting Irish of the mid-late 1920s, and they actually did a pretty good job on it, given the technology available to movie-makers of the era. The movie was written by the trio of Walter DeLeon, Robert Keith, and Richard Schayer, with Russel Mack calling the shots from the director's chair.

It starred Lew Ayres as Bucky O'Brien, William Bakewell as Jim Stewart, a very young Andy Devine as Truck McCall, and J. Farrell MacDonald as a very Knute Rockne like head coach, known only as Coach. The plot revolved around a pair of friends who enrolled at Notre Dame, and made the football team...one of them very much a team player, the other the first string quarterback who thought he was the only man on the team.

Andy Devine's character, Truck McCall was based on George Gipp...'The Gipper'...and in fact, Devine as Truck McCall recited a version of Gipp's famed 'Win one for the Gipper' request, nearly a decade before some guy named Ron Reagan did so far more famously in 'Knute Rockne All American'. Devine's character also added a bit of comedy relief throughout the film. Devine was already a veteran of nearly 20 films when he appeared in The Spirit of Notre Dame, and would go on to appear in nearly 200 movies and TV shows before his death, at 71, in 1977

The actual Four Horsemen' appear in the movie as themselves, BTW, along with most of 'The Seven Mules'...both on screen and in stock game footage. They actually did a pretty decent job in the acting department.

Speaking of said stock footage, there is some truly awesome game footage in this movie...it's almost worth the watch for that alone.

The plot's pretty predictable, with conflict and a love triangle thrown in for good measure, and then everyone pulling together to win The Big Game (Notre Dame-Army) at the end. I watched it (Rented on Amazon Prime) and it was actually a very enjoyable way to spend an hour and twenty minutes.

Knute Rockne was killed enroute to L.A. to act as a technical advisor on this film, and the movie is dedicated to him. Not only that, but at the beginning of the movie, before the film's first scene, there is a very moving five or so minute tribute to Knute Rockne.

There were several posters released for The Spirit of Notre Dame, but this is one
of the two that were most prominent, with The Four Horsemen pictured prominently
beneath the title image, and the dedication to Knute Rockne in the poster's
bottom right corner.

The second...and IMHO, most attractive...of the two posters for the movie, with Lew Ayres prominently
 featured as the title image, and the dedication to Knute Rockne prominently
 displayed with the title image, directly below the title itself.

Knute Rockne All American

This is the one that everyone knows at least one line from...the famed 'Win one for the Gipper'.

Knute Rockne All American was a direct biographical movie about the coach, released in 1940 and written by Bonnie Rockne and Robert Buckner, with directors Lloyd Bacon and William K. Howard at the helm. The movie starred Pat Obrien as Knute Rockne and future Governor of California and 40th U.S. President, Ronald Reagan, as George 'The Gipper' Gipp.  

Bonnie Rockne had a great deal of creative control over casting and script, and heartily approved of both choices, though Pat O'Brien wasn't the first choice to portray her husband. James Cagney was very much in the running to portray Knute Rockne until his anti-Catholic leanings were disclosed. As Notre Dame also had a bit of say in casting choices, Cagney was quickly dropped from the cast, replaced by O'Brien.

Much of the movie was actually filmed on campus at Notre Dame, making it one of only two movies to ever have that distinction, the other being the 1993 release 'Rudy'.

The movie premiered in South Bend on Oct 5, 1940, and opened to generally favorable reviews. It showed up on 'The Late Show' type TV fairly regularly back in the pre-streaming era of television, and is currently streamable on several platforms such as Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV.

There were also several posters made for Knute Rockne All American. This one, featuring Ronald Reagan
as George Gipp as the title image was one of the two most seen.

The other featured a close-up photo of Pat O'Brien as Knute Rockne for the title
image. Pat Obrien looked nothing like Rockne and had to spend about three hours 
in the make-up chair every shooting day to get even a vague resemblance to the coach.

The movie premiered at The Colfax theater, in South Bend, Indiana, on Oct 5, 1940, and as this unfortunately grainy photo shows, the crowds were just as huge as if it had premiered at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood. 

The Colfax was huge, seating 2000 patrons, and was listed on the registry of historic places, but was still demolished to make way for an expansion of the South Bend Tribune Building in 1991

<***> Links, Notes, and Stuff <***>

 This one was a piece of cake to research. For the most part. Even though all of my research luck wasn't the good kind. Most of it was, but, not all. ::Sigh:: There was one big disappointment.

 Back in 2009, a fellow named James Stone wrote a very well received, well researched, and from what I can gather, well written book, entitled 'The Plane That Killed Knute Rockne'.

It was an in-depth look at Knute Rockne's career as well as a look at Anthony Fokker, designer of the Fokker F-10, the two pilots who were flying Flight 599 that fateful morning, and a very in-depth look at both the plane and the crash. It would have been an awesome tool in researching this...er...learned tome, had I been able to get hold of one.

::Sigh:: And of course it was out of print and had been for about a decade or so by the time I started doing the research for this post.. The only two copies I could find both cost far more than my budget would allow. 

But even without Jim Stone's book, this was one of those times that I almost had too much info to work with...a far  far better problem than having too little info, trust me on this. Then again I knew this one was going one of the easier posts to research before I started...I mean, really, type 'Knute Rockne ' or 'Knute Rockne Crash' into the ol' Google Machine or any of it's cousins, and you get literally pages and pages of links, though, as with any internet-sourced info, you do have to filter it a bit. The article that started off by referring to Rockne as 'The Gipper', for example, I tossed out without reading another line. But for every throw-away link I encountered, I found twenty good solid ones. So no, research wasn't a problem on this one.

Content-wise, however, things got just a scosh more complicated, and again, I knew, going in that there was far more to the story of TWA Flight 599's crash than the crash...or even Knute Rockne's death... alone. The crash, in fact, is only a part of the story, and if I had written about just the crash, the post would have felt unfinished in a huge way. I couldn't, for example, talk about Knute Rockne without delving into the history of college football just a bit (And trust me, I barely scratched the surface), and I also had to lead in with why the beloved coach was so beloved. 

It was what happened after the crash, though, that both became the crash's legacy, and made this post a bit more complicated that just 'A post about a plane crash'.

This meant that, after I told the story of the crash itself, I had to go into what was, arguably, the most important part of the story...the changes that came about due to the crash, and there were a slew of 'em! When TWA Flight 599 cratered that remote Kansas farm field, the Aeronautics Board was forced by the Press to do away with it's controversial policy of keeping the general public in the dark about the causes of air crashes...the Knute Rockne crash was, as I noted in the body of the post,  the first in which the official cause was released to the public.

All those CAA/NTSB accident report PDF files that anyone with an internet connection can download for free are a direct result of Knute Rockne's crash. 

Even more importantly, though, the crash began the birthing process of what we now know as modern commercial aviation, as well as all but directly leading to the development of what is, arguably, the most famous breed of airplane that ever took to the sky...the Douglas DC-3. That particular aircraft, BTW, was very much the prototype for the modern airliner. If wooden-winged airliners hadn't been all but outlawed, the development of safe, all-metal airliners would have likely taken far longer than it actually did..

SO, yeah, this one was a cinch...and lots of fun...yet still more than a little complicated...to research and write.

I just hope that, in the process of writing this one, I did 'Rock' Rockne justice, and that I managed to make this an enjoyable and informative read while I was at it.

 As always, any errors are mine and mine alone. Any corrections that need to be made, let me know!

One quick note of apology...at several places in the NOTES, the font size changes to a smaller font...Blogger's software did this all on it's own, for reasons known only to it.  I've tried to fix it, and so for, have been unsuccessful. I'll keep trying...sorry for any inconvenience this causes

Now...on to the Notes! 

<***>

The original spelling of Knute Rockne's last name was actually 'Rokne'. His dad, Lars Rokne, added the 'c' to Americanize their surname after they moved to the U.S. in 1893

<***>

Contrary to popular myth and legend, Knute Rockne did not invent the forward pass, nor were the Notre Dame Fighting Irish the first football team to use it. They may, however, have been the team that popularized it. But they didn't pioneer it.

First lets take a look at the Notre Dame-Army game that popularized the Forward Pass. The game was played during a period when Notre Dame was looking for quality teams to schedule...their team was scoring run-away victories over less skilled opponents, and many midwestern schools had boycotted them due to both ant-catholic sentiment, and concerns over player eligibility. So Notre Dame looked to the East and West Coasts for opponents.

Just hired head coach Jess Harper wrote letters to several schools asking to be placed on their schedule, and one of those schools was the U.S. Military Academy, in West Point, N.Y., better known among football fans as simply 'Army'. Michigan had cancelled their game with Army that year, and the Cadets had an open slot...Nov 1, 1913.

 The game was an away game for the Irish, played at West Point on a raw, cold Saturday afternoon, a decade pre-Miche Stadium, on The Plain, in front of 5000 fans sitting on temporary bleachers. Those fans...almost all of them Army fans...were in for a show, as well as a disappointment for the Army faithful.

Notre Dame quarterback Gus Dorias kept the ball in the air, connecting on 14 of 17 forward passes, several of the completions...one a touchdown pass...to junior end Knute Rockne. The first half was close...the Irish  were up 14-13 when the halftime whistle blew, but the second half is when Dorias really pressed the aerial attack. 

Notre Dame pulled steadily away in the second half, scoring three more touchdowns...one of them on a forward pass...while holding Army scoreless, pummeling the Cadets 35-13. The forward pass' praises were sung on the sports pages, and Notre Dame became famous for their aerial game, but it still took a few years for the pass to become canon in football. That 1913 ND-Army game was...and is...still known as the 'First Modern College Game'.

Except, well, it really wasn't.

See, that Notre Dame-Army game was not the first game to be dominated by the Aerial Attack. That happened six years earlier, in 1907, only a year or so after the forward pass was legalized. And it was Knute Rockne's fellow coaching icon, Pop Warner who did it.

Warner was coaching at a small Indian (As in Native American) prep school in Pennsylvania, named Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and he introduced the forward pass to the small school's team as soon as passing the ball became legal.

Lets just say that the Carlisle Eleven took to the forward pass like a fish to water. These kids were small but they were quick, and agile, and quarterback Pete Hauser could drill passes to his receivers as if they were laser-guided. To show off their skills, Carlisle kicked off their season with a 40-0 win over Lebanon Valley, then tallied five more wins...most of them shut-outs...winning their first six games by a total score of 188-11.

Then they decided to take on the Big Boys, traveling to the University of Pennsylvania, where they mopped up Franklin Field with the Quakers, keeping the ball in the air to win 26-6 while gaining 402 yards to Penn's 76. 

The next week they went to Harvard, where they won a tight, well played game 23-15. Princeton finally beat them, shutting them out 16-0, but by then little Carlisle had shown just what the forward pass could do for the offensive game. 

Notre Dame, however, got the credit...a mistake that Knute Rockne himself tried to correct without success.

What that long-ago Notre Dame-Army game did do, however, is cement Notre Dame's reputation as a football power house, as well as kicking off a rivalry that's lasted, with a ten year hiatus between 1947 and 1957, for over a century, though the meetings after 1957 haven't been yearly and have had a couple more ten year gaps. The two teams have met 51 times since that first game in 1913. While Army handed Notre Dame two of it's biggest losses...59-0 in 1944, and 48-0 in 1945...Notre Dame leads the series 39-8-4.

The Irish aerial attack still dominates. The Notre Dame-Navy rivalry started in 1927, and continued uninterrupted until 2019 (Covid cancelled the 2020 game, the series resumed in 2021). The Notre Dame-Navy rivalry is the longest uninterrupted rivalry in college football, and it continued, of course, in 2023.  The weekend before I started working on these notes...August 26, 2023...both the Irish and Navy's Midshipmen traveled to Dublin, Ireland to show off some American football in front of thousands at Dublin's Aviva Stadium.  Notre Dame walked the dog on the Midshipmen, winning 42-3. The aerial attack dominated, with the Irish going 20 for 25 on pass completions, and all but one of their six TDs being pass plays. 

Knute Rockne was looking down, grinning from ear to ear.

Notre Dame leads that series, too, Big Time...81-13-1.

<***>

Knute Rockne and Gus Dorias didn't come by their expertise at the pass play out of this air...the two of them had been discussing the aerial game for a while. Knute Rockne and Gus Dorias bonded near instantly over their love of football, and if the two of them had a spare minute so together, that was one of the topics they discussed.

Now, college students, then and now, often grabbed jobs to generate spending money, and sometime during their junior year at Notre Dame, Knute Rockne and Gus Dories applied for...and got...live-in summer jobs at Cedar Point Amusement Park and beach, in Sandusky Ohio, about 200 miles just about due east of South Bend.

They grabbed much desired jobs as life guards at the popular beach, situated on a long, narrow peninsula at the extreme northeast corner of the city of Sandusky, poking out into Lake Erie at the mouth of Sandusky Bay. They spent untold hours protecting bathers and swimmers at the beach, and performing all of the tasks that lifeguards the world over did and still do perform...but what they did while on duty isn't what's germane to our story...it's what they did while off duty that's important.

One of the items they brought with them when they journeyed to Sandusky was a football, or likely several footballs...and wile they were off, at least a couple of hours a day, they were out on the beach, seeing just what they could do with the forward pass, as well as the best ways to pass, receive, and run patterns.

Those untold hours on a Ohio beach, of course, doomed Army on Nov 1, 1913, because by then Gus Dorias had the forward pass down to an art form, and Knute Rockne had receiving them down just about as well. Rockne, of course, made notes and kept the aerial game in his playbook, to be used extensively when he became the winningest head coach on college football history.

Cedar Point Amusement Park...the second oldest amusement park in the U.S., as well as one of the most visited, is still very much in business today, and still includes a mile long bathing beach, the very beach where Knute Rockne and Gus Dorias perfected the forward pass over a century ago.

<***>

Notre Dame Stadium is known as 'The House That Rockne Built', and part of the reason, of course, is the positive effect that Rockne's coaching had on the school's football program, but most of the reason centers on the fact that Rockne was the reason the stadium got built in the first place.

For eleven of the twelve years that Rockne coached the team's home field was the small, outdated Cartier Field, which Rockne had been pushing to have replaced pretty much since he became head coach. Notre Dame's finances were controlled by Holy Cross's Priests, who were infamously conservative when it came to spending money, and equally slow in making decisions. 

By the end the 1928 season...at 5-4, Rockne's worst season...his frustration had grown to a tipping point. Even with the less than stellar record that year, gate receipts had totaled around $500,000 (Just shy of 8.4 million in 2023 dollars) and he well knew that, with a larger, more modern facility, they could double or even triple that figure. So, at the end of the '28 season, he turned in his resignation, stating that if he didn't get a new stadium, he'd go elsewhere.

Cartier Field in October 1920, before it was enlarged twice...the stadium seated around 5,000 at this time, far too small for any major schools to play Notre Dame at home. Only other small, midwestern schools played Notre Dame at Cartier Field. When Notre Dame played big schools, such as Penn or Army, at 'Home', they generally played the games at Soldier Field in Chicago. 

Aerial view of Cartier Field from about 1926, after the stadium had been enlarged and modernized...it sat around 30,000 at this point, still too small for major Universities to play the Irish on their home turf. Also visible in this shot is the old field house, which is the arch roofed building right mid-frame just above the baseball diamond. Pretty much the entirety of the Notre Dame campus, circa mid-1920s, is also visible...it was far smaller nearly 100 years ago!

With-in a couple of years after this pic was taken, Notre Dame Stadium would be built mostly out of frame towards the left bottom corner of the pic, Cartier Field's stands would be torn down at the end of the 1928 season to make way for the new stadium, but the field itself would remain for decades, as the home field for Notre Dame's baseball and track & field teams as well as becoming the Irish practice field. 

University President Charles O'Donnell was willing to compromise, but wasn't willing to put the school in debt to build a new stadium. Calculations were made, and it was decided that the next year's gate receipts, plus what was already in the bank, and a new, idea...selling season tickets and box seats...would finance the new venue. 

There would be 240 six-person box seats, bought for ten seasons, at three different price points...$3000 between the 45 yard lines, $2500 between the 35 and 45 yard lines, and $2000 between the 25 and 35 (In 2023 bucks, that would be $53,630, $44,690, and $35,750 respectively.).

Football tickets were around five bucks in 1928, so ten seasons worth of home game tickets would have been, roughly, $1500...far less expensive than the ten year purchase of box seat season tickets. Buying the box seats, though, guaranteed you that prime, mid field seat every season...they sold the box seats out, from what I understand, almost before the first shovel-load of dirt was turned, raising $150,000 (Almost 2.7 Million today) in the process.

The same group of architects who designed Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park were hired to design the stadium, and South Bend's Sollitt Construction Company...still in business today...got the bid for construction, which ended up costing $750,000 ( $13.4 Million today). Knute Rockne was deeply involved in the stadium's design.

Cartier Field's stands were torn down at the end of the 1928 season, after a final game... All of the 1929 season home games would be played at Chicago's Soldier Field, and planning and design began, with ground broken and earth preparation started in the Fall of 1929...and then they had an unusually cold fall and winter, even for that part of the world, and actual construction didn't start until April 2, 1930.

The stadium was built in, literally, six months (Try to get that done today!). When finished, it seated 59,075 fans in 55 rows of seats...if you walked the perimeter of the stadium, you'd cover a half mile. The press box was glass enclosed and towered 60 feet above the field

Photo of the interior of Notre Dame Stadium, taken from the south bleachers, very shortly after it was completed. The stadium seated 59,075 fans as originally built. It's still in use, much enlarged and modified, after 93 years.

Aerial postcard pic of Notre Dame Stadium from 1946

Notre Dame Stadium as it appears today, after the 400 million dollar 'Campus Crossroads renovation, which also added a trio of 

huge eight story, multi-function buildings to the stadium...Corbett Family Hall, on the east side of the stadium (On the far side of the stadium), O'Neil Hall, on the south end of the stadium (On the south end zone end, wearing the ginormous Jumbotron) and Duncan Student Center, on the west side of the stadium (In the foreground of the pic), adding over 750,000 square feet of student dining and recreation, teaching, research, and performance spaces, making the stadium useful year round. 

During football season (Or if it's used for a special event, such as a concert) the stadium seats 80,795, including over three thousand premium seats on the stadium side of the three buildings. The stadium sells out regularly.

 The first home game in the new venue was on October 4, 1930, with The Fighting Irish defeating SMU 20-14, and to christen the new Stadium properly, the first touchdown was a 98 yard kick-off return by 'Jumping Joe' Savoldi. The next week the new venue was dedicated, and Savoldi scored three touchdowns on the way to a 26-2 pummeling of Navy.

The stadium sold out for the first time for the 1931 Notre Dame-USC game, with 60,731 fans in attendance, and would regularly sell out over the next 93 years. It's also been refurbished and expanded several times, the first time between 1994 and 1997, when the press box was enlarged, a second tier of seats was added, increasing the capacity to 80,000, and permanent lighting was installed.

The next renovation came between 2014 and 2018, when three big new 8 story buildings were added...Duncan Student Center on the west side of the stadium, O'Neil Hall on the south side, and Corbett Family Hall on the east. This renovation reduced the stadium's general admission capacity to 77,622, but at the same time added over 750,000 square feet of student dining and recreation, teaching, research, and performance spaces. While they were at it, over 3000 more premium seats were added (Kicking the stadium's actual capacity up to 80,795 fans) and new electronic scoreboards and a jumbotron were added as well.

The 1930 season, sadly, was the only season that Knute Rockne got to coach in the new stadium, and that brings us to the smallest, but in some ways most important addition to the stadium...a statue honoring the men who put Notre Dame on the map, and, well, 'Built The House'.

In 2009, a life-size bronze statue of Rockne was unveiled outside the stadium's North Gate...now he can watch over 'his boys' for time eternal.

Statue of Knute Rockne outside of the North Gate of Notre Dame Stadium, unveiled in 2009

<***>

A quick word about the mega-stadiums that popped up like huge concrete mushrooms all over the U.S in the 1910s and most especially, the 1920s. There were many good reasons that universities and colleges wanted big, large-capacity stadiums for their football teams. Gate receipts were a big part of it...the gate receipts were split, with each team getting a percentage, usually half. The larger the stadium, the more tickets sold...the more tickets sold, the larger the visiting team's share of the gate receipts. This is why the size and quality of a school's stadium very much determined which teams they could convince to play them at home. No major university was going to sent their team to an away game...especially one several hundred miles away...to split the gate receipts from a crowd of five or ten thousand. Cartier Field had been expanded to around thirty thousand seats by 1926, and that was still considered small.

Also, not every game's going to be a sell-out. Lets take a look at a split from both Cartier and then-new Notre Dame stadium, with a 75% capacity crowd.

Cartier Stadium, at it's maximum capacity in 1926, seated around 30,000, so 75% of a full house would be 22,500 fans, who payed an average of $5.00 per ticket. 22,500 x5=$112,500(a little over 1.94 million today) NOW...10% or so of that needs to come off the top for operating expenses, so subtract $11,250 from that, giving you $101,250 to split two ways, or $50,625 to each school. ( $874,328 today). Admittedly, not small change...but not enough to convince many schools to play the Irish at home, so major schools playing Notre Dame would play them at a neutral (And much larger) stadium. The gate receipts benefited, but it was a major pain for everyone on the home side, team, staff, and fans alike.

Now, lets take a look at a game at new Notre Dame Stadium at 75% of seats sold.

Notre Dame stadium, in its first several years seated 59,075 fans, so 75% of seats sold would be 44,206 tickets at five bucks apiece...gate receipts of $221,531 ($3,825,990 today). Take ten percent off the top, and you have $199,378 to split, or $99,689 for each school (That'd be $1,721,696 today).

So both schools would make out like bandits, plus they have modern facilities. And the Irish faithful from South Bend didn't have to take a road trip to go to a 'Home' game.

The gate receipts are still split today, of course, though some conferences (Big Ten, I'm lookin' at you!) use some strange algebraic algorithm to determine the split. The practice of splitting gate receipts, though, got it's start over a century ago, and drove the building of the huge, and beautiful college stadiums we enjoy today.

<***>

Of all of the many rivalries that The Irish and their loyal fans have enjoyed over the last century and change, the Notre Dame-Nebraska rivalry is probably the strangest, as well as most unfortunate.

This was an intense rivalry in the mid 1910s and early-mid 1920s, specifically between 1915 and 1925 During that decade, The Irish and the Cornhuskers met eleven times, and split the series five wins apiece, playing to a scoreless tie in 1918. 

The majority of this series occurred under Knute Rockne, the last three games of the series played during the reign of Notre Dame's Four Horsemen. Notre Dame only lost two games in the three years that the legendary Four Horsemen made up the Irish backfield, both away games at Nebraska....one a 14-6 loss on Nov 30, 1922 (Which was also the last game played in Nebraska's old Nebraska Field), and another one touchdown loss...14-7 to the Cornhuskers the next year...in front of a crowd of 43,000 in brand new, and still unfinished Memorial Stadium.

Notre Dame would get their revenge for the twin losses in 1924 by walking the dog on the Cornhuskers, pummeling them 34-6 at Notre Dame.

Then, Notre Dame returned to Lincoln in 1925, where the Cornhuskers returned the favor, besting The Fighting Irish by a score of 17-0...and that would be the last game of the series, and the last meeting between the two teams for more than twenty years. 

Back in the mid 1920s, Lincoln, Nebraska was a big Klan town, with a reported 5000 or so of the town's 50,000 citizens being KKK members. Among the many ethnic and religious groups that the Klan strongly disliked were, for reasons unknown, Catholics. This resulted in catcalls, profane insults, and the Irish being pelted with various items as they came on and off the field, and this resulted in that shut-out in Nebraska's brand new stadium being the very last contest between the two teams until after World War II. USC would replace Nebraska on the Notre Dame football schedule. The 1926 game...and all others...were cancelled, and Nebraska coach Earnest Bearg blamed the end of the series on 'Disgruntled gamblers in South Bend who were tired of losing their money'

The two teams have squared off a few times since, but the series never even came close to gaining the momentum it had a century or so ago.

Notre Dame and Nebraska squared off again in 1947 and 1948, both games going to The Irish in a big way...31-0 and 44-13 respectively. The Cornhuskers had to wait until the 1973 Orange Bowl to avenge those double slaughter-fests, handing the Irish a 40-6 beatdown. Then the two teams didn't meet again for another nearly 30 years, playing a two game series, both at Notre Dame Stadium, and both Notre Dame losses...a 27-24 squeaker, won by Nebraska on a overtime touchdown, in 2000, and a 27-0 shutout in '01. They haven't met again since.

For a college football fan, there's little more fun and exciting than watching a game between a pair of long-term rivals, especially if you're an alum of one of the schools, and most especially if you get to watch it in person, yelling your lungs out, rooting for your team from the stands.

The Nebraska fans missed out because of the hatred spawned by a small group of people nearly a century ago...and what makes it even sadder, it happened during the reign of a man who was the exact polar opposite of the group that caused the series...and the rivalry...to end.

<***>

One little known fact about Notre Dame's 1929 season...early in the season, a leg injury Rockne had suffered during  a vacation developed into phlebitis, taking him off of his feet for most of the season. Assistant Coach Tom Lieb was the defacto head coach on the side-lines, with Rockne coaching from the stands.

<***>

The very last game that Knute Rockne ever coached wasn't a regular season intercollegiate football game, nor did The fighting Irish even line up against another college team...they played the New York Giants, at the Giants home field at the time, the legendary Polo Grounds. Oh, and it wasn't even the 1929-1930 Irish that he coached

'Say what??' You ask. Ahh, read on I say!

This game would also be the last time that 'The Four Horsemen'...Notre Dame's legendary 1922-24 backfield, consisting of QB Harry Stuhldreher, left halfback Jim Crowley, right halfback Don Miller, and fullback Elmer Layden...played together. During their tenure at Notre Dame, the Irish only lost two games, both to Nebraska, as they blasted through holes punched through numerous defensive lines by 'The Seven Mules' as ND's 1922-'24 Offensive Line was known. Oh...most of 'The Mules' would also suit up for the game.

Just what was this game? In the Fall of 1930, New York mayor Jimmy Walker had created the Unemployment Relief Fund, to assist those thrown out of work by the year and change old Great Depression.

Hmmmm...how to make lot's of money for said fund? How 'bout a charity football game between arguably America's favorite college team, and the hometown pro-football heroes, the New York Giants?

And so it was set up...sort of. Notre Dame would line up against the New York Giants on the afternoon of December 14, 1930, at the storied Polo Grounds, which was being provided, rent free, for the game by venue and franchise owner Charles Stoneham. Except it wouldn't  be the national champion 1930 Fighting Irish. It would, however, be a quickly cobbled-together alumni team.

Why?

Notre Dame was just coming off of a perfect 10-0 season, walking the dog on everyone except Southern Methodist (SMU) and Army, out-scoring their opponents 256-74, and winning a third national title while they were at it. They had bested Army by one point only a couple of weeks earlier, and had mopped up L. A. Memorial Stadium with the USC Trojans, shutting them out 27-0, only the previous weekend.

The charity game game had been set up a couple of months earlier, and Rockne knew his boys would be coming off of a long train-ride to the West Coast and back that very week. Now, today, in 2023, after the game, the Boys in Blue and Gold would have gathered up their gear, probably crashed at their hotel for the night, headed for LAX the next morning, climbed aboard a big Boeing or Airbus that was very likely chartered for the purpose, and been back in South Bend a bit after lunchtime.

But this wasn't 2023, it was 1930. L.A. was easily two or so days from South Bend by train, then they'd have to turn around the next weekend and take a 15 or so hour train ride to New York. Rockne didn't want to over-extend his players. So he got in touch with several former players, and convinced several of them...including all of the Four Horsemen and most of the Seven Mules...to don the Blue and Gold one more time, 

Rockne did manage to convince a few of the then-current Irish standouts...most notably two time All American quarterback Frank Carideo, '31, and one of his favored receivers, Class of '31 classmate Jack Chevigny...to suit up

The Irish had a problem that they didn't realize they had. While the Notre Dame alumni were playing with charity and service to their fellow man in their hearts, the Giants went into the game as if they repelling an invading army. (And in their minds, they kind of were).

The cobbled together Notre Dame team got together the Tuesday before the game and spent four days going over plays that they hadn't run for, in a couple of cases, six or so years. Also, while some of the players had played together...again, some of them half a decade ago...the entire team had never worked together. It would make a difference.

The Giants were the fledgling NFL's second place team at the end of the 1930 pro season, and were coming off of a winning 13-4 season. They had regularly drawn between ten and twelve thousand fans to the Polo Grounds for home games, with total attendance for the season at just north of 82 grand...but that was nothing compared to college attendance back then. College games drew far larger crowds every weekend. 110,000 fans had packed Chicago's Soldier Field to watch The Irish squeak past Army 7-6 two weekends before the charity game, and 88,000 had watched Notre Dame's drubbing of USC at L.A. Memorial Stadium...USC's home field...a weekend earlier.

On top of that, there were those who said that any given college team could beat any given pro team. The Giants were on a mission to prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that they could indeed beat a college team.

It didn't help the Giants' mood towards their opponents that local advertisements...both print and radio...hyped the game as a chance to see 'The Four Horsemen Ride One More Time'. The game wasn't being hyped as a chance to see the Giants play. It was hyped as a chance to see Notre Dame walk all over the Giants. The New York Eleven weren't about to let that happen.

While, as noted, the Notre Dame alumni, plus a couple of current players, practiced for about four days before boarding a train for New York, the Giants  spent the full week or so before the game in full contact drills, and sent scouts to South Bend to see what the Irish had in store for them.

Again, it'd make a difference.

On a clear, cold Sunday afternoon, more than 50,000 fans packed the legendary Polo Grounds to watch the 'Notre Dame All-Stars' take on the N.Y Giants. Notre Dame was fielding a team that was heavy on backs, light on defense, not in the best of shape, and who hadn't played together in ages, or in some cases at all. 

They were going up against a team that was bigger, faster, had played together for, in some cases, a couple of years, and who had just come off of a 13-4 season. And, to piss the Giants off a bit more, when the cobbled-together Irish took the field, they were met with a crescendo as if they were conquering heroes, while the Giants, on the other hand, barely got a peep of greeting from the fans when they took the gridiron. It was more than obvious who the crowd had come to see.

The Giants illustrated their displeasure with this from the git-go. The Irish won the toss, elected to receive, and caught it in the end zone. Notre Dame ran it out to about the five, where the ball carrier was suddenly buried in blue and white jerseys at, maybe their own five yard line. A couple of plays later and less than a minute into the game, the Giants' six man defensive line punched through Notre Dame's offensive line like a cannonball through cardboard and threw Stuhldreher for a loss, and worse, into the end zone for a safety. Less than a minute in, and Notre Dame was already down 2-0

The whole game went about the same way. The Giants had an effective and impressive aerial game, thanks to Giants Quarterback Benny Friedman, who is considered by many to be the NFL's first great passer, and he basically turned Notre Dame's old trick around and tossed it back at them, keeping the ball in the air.

Notre Dame's Stuhldreher, on the other hand, went 0-9 in the pass department, throwing a pair of interceptions while he was at it. The Giants held Notre Dame's offense to only 34 yards gained for the game, never letting an Irish ball carrier anywhere close to midfield, and trapping them deep in their own territory for the majority of the game.

The Giants would score twice more before the whistle blew for halftime, both in the second quarter, and both runs by Friedman...a four yard run at the beginning of the second quarter, and a 22-yard run, through a truck-sized hole created by the Giant's offensive line, as the clock ticked down to the half. As the whistle blew, the Giants were up 15-0

As the teams retired to the locker rooms, Rockne searched out Giants coach Harry March and good-naturedly chided him for running the score up on the hapless Irish alumni. He then reminded March of just why they were actually playing the game in the first place, and asked him to call off the dogs.

And, he did. New York put their reserves in for much of the second half, giving the first string a break. The Giants only scored a single touchdown in the second half...a third quarter touchdown pass from second string QB Hap Moran to Glenn Campbell. Oh the Giants still controlled the ball, but they didn't run up the score. The scoreboard showed the Giants up 22-0 when the finial whistle blew.

The Giants won the game, but it seems they just couldn't catch a break in the press. The local papers, as well as sports pages nation-wide, gave huge props to the plucky Notre Dame alumni, who'd come into the game with only four days of practice, after not playing together for half a decade and change (And for some of them, ever). And to give Notre Dame more props, their defense was actually fairly effective, even in the first half...the Giants could have really walked the dog on them had it not been.

Of course, this being a high profile charity event, then as now at such events, celebrities came out of the woodwork, and the various reporters writing about the game gave far more column inches to Who was there with Who, What they were wearing, What they were doing, and again, with Who...you know, the celebrity gossip we're still familiar with today...the names change, the gossip stays pretty much the same.

The big winners, of course, were those who benefitted from the proceeds of the game, The charity game raised more than $115,000...$2,114,250 in 2023 dollars...for the unemployed of NYC. The game was absolutely a success, in on small part thanks the the participation of Knute Rockne's Notre Dame Fighting Irish.  Of course the Four Horsemen never donned the Blue and Gold again and would never share a backfield, though several of them did coach at either the collegiate or high school level over the years. 

And, sadly, Knute Rockne never coached another game...three months and two weeks after that final whistle blew at The Polo Grounds, Knute Rockne climbed aboard TWA Flight 599...

<***>

Fokker Aircraft Corp was already well known by the time the first Fokker Trimotor took to the air in the mid 1920s...after all, they built over a thousand examples of several types of fighters during World War I, three of them...the Fokker Eindecker, which was the first to utilize an interrupter gear that allowed machine guns to fire through the propeller arc, the Fokker D-VII, the best all-round fighter of the war in many aviation experts' opinion, and the iconic Fokker Triplane, a uber-nimble and deadly little fighter that is also the aircraft most often associated with Manfred Von Richthofen...The Red Baron...even though it's not the aircraft he scored most of his 80 victories in.

Unfortunately, Fokker was also known far and wide, among German aviators and German Air Force brass, for something else...seriously sub-par build quality. On numerous occasions the IdFlieg...the German Army bureau that oversaw military aviation during WW-1...grounded aircraft types and forced Fokker to make repairs and replace parts at their own expense. One of these occasions may have even foreshadowed the crash of TWA Flight 599.

The Fokker Triplane was a deadly little aircraft at the hands of a good pilot. Unbelievably nimble, the Triplane (Officially designated the Fokker DR-1) could reputedly turn inside of anything built by either the British or French. It was also...again in the hands of a superior pilot...capable of performing an early version  of 'The Cobra'...hanging from it's spinning prop as the pilot kicked in full right or left rudder, and 'switched ends', allowing the pilot to either suddenly attack or dive away in a different direction than that expected by his opponent, leaving said opponent with egg on his face and, often, a bullet-riddled, burning, falling ride. 

The Fokker Tri-Plane also had a far more unfortunate trait, however, one that was often deadly to it's own pilot...it had a habit of suddenly shedding it's top wing. A couple of the pilots who experienced this deadly trait managed to make an emergency landing and get their crippled DR-1...and themselves...back on the ground in one piece, likely having to clean out their own pants and the Triplane's pilot seat afterward as a result. Most of the time, however, the triplane would continue to come apart after loosing it's uppermost wing, killing it's pilot in the process.

The IdFlieg, upon being made aware of the problem, immediately grounded all Fokker Triplanes, and started an investigation of just why the aircraft lost their top wings so frequently.

Their finding?

The wings weren't sufficiently waterproofed, allowing water to get inside and delaminate the spars and attach points, allowing the weakened wings to pull away from the plane during certain sudden maneuvers.

Fokker's quality control issues apparently followed it across the pond, to Fokker Aircraft of America, maker of the various Fokker Tri-motors, including the F-10. The F-10 was built at a plant in Glen Dale, West Va.,and the wing spars were assembled by:

Gluing and nailing ribs between the flanges at specified intervals… Graduated thicknesses of plywood were glued on each face of the spar. They were given final form by planing away the surplus wood with jack planes. A crew of six to ten did this work, working to plus or minus one thirty-second inch which is rather exacting when working with wood.  (The italics are an excerpt from Archive Wheeling/A Crash of Coincidences)

The problem was, the carpenters and woodworkers who were hired to build the wings, while they may have been masters at, say furniture building, and home construction, were not used to the close and demanding tolerances they needed to adhere to while building up the wing spars, and as a result, they were off...by a lot...pretty often.

To compound this problem, quality control was, at best, hit or miss, and at worst, nonexistent. It's believed that this lack of quality control was one of the factors in Flight 599's fatal plunge.

The crash, of course, led to the end of production of the Fokker F-10. The plant, in Glendale, W. Va, closed down in October 1931, about six months after the crash.

<***>

One of the factors concerning the crash that is still unclear is just which direction the plane was flying when it lost it's wing. Many people believe it lost it's right wing after turning back towards Kansas City, but before resuming it's course to Wichita, others believe it had made that second turn back towards Wichita before shedding it's wing, and still other people think the wing may have departed the aircraft in the middle of the second turn, back towards Wichita.

Of course, we'll never know for sure...there were no Flight Data Recorders or Cockpit Voice Recorders in 1931, so all the investigators had to go by were radio traffic log transcripts and eye witness testimony. A couple of eye witnesses stated that they saw the plane, just below the clouds, heading north-east, back towards Kansas City, so we know for sure that they did swing around and head back for KC. I, personally, think they also resumed their course back towards Wichita, and the transcript of the radio traffic, from the log at Wichita, seems to confirm this.

I also think that, as they tried to decide which option they were going to exercise...return to K.C, or resume the flight to Wichita...they actually flew around a giant airborne oval, and were aimed southwest...back towards Wichita...when the wing failed. 

Of course more than a few people...among them, Anthony Fokker, founder and owner of Fokker Aircraft Corp...were of the very strong opinion that they shouldn't have had to decide whether or not to return to Kansas City, because that shouldn't have been flying that day in the first place.

These people feel that the flight shouldn't have even left the ground that morning due to the weather. Anthony Fokker noted that the wing wouldn't have failed had they waited for the weather to clear before taking off.  And he's right, of course...had the flight been cancelled until the weather moderated, Flight 599's passengers would have most likely stretched their legs in Wichita as the Fokker was topped off with Av-gas, then flown on to their destinations.

But that flight wasn't going to be cancelled, because flights were very seldom cancelled due to weather back then, despite the fact that the tech to safely fly in such weather really didn't exist yet. In those early days of air travel there was tremendous pressure to maintain schedules because airlines needed to prove themselves as viable, reliable alternatives to the railroad, something that was a hard sell in the late 1920s, because back then air travel was the most dangerous way to travel. 

It didn't help the reputation of air travel that passenger safety may have occasionally...OK, more than occasionally...taken a back seat to putting the flight at it's destination on time. I think Flight 599 just may have been one of those times.

 Of course, had the wing not already been water damaged, they would have probably made it to Wichita safely, despite the storm. A little airsick, perhaps, but otherwise safe.

Which bring to another point, one which I noted in the main body of the article...that wing was going to fail at some point, no matter what the weather was. It could have just as well failed on a perfectly clear, calm day. That early spring cold front over Kansas, though, almost definitely caused the wing to fail sooner rather that later. 

<***>

Yet another controversy almost arose when Travelers Insurance, which held the policy covering both hull loss and liability on the aircraft, reported the loss of $50,000 in cash, carried by passenger H.J. Christen, of Chicago.

It was very likely assumed that one of our souvenir hunters had found not only a souvenir, but a major windfall...$50,000 1931 dollars equates to just over $1,000,000 today, so it would have been a very nice windfall indeed for anyone who discovered it and spirited it away from the scene. Of course, it would have also been grand theft, which is frowned upon by the State of Kansas (And every other state, too).

While I'm pretty sure a major investigation was kicked off by the missing money, Knute Rockne's death completely overshadowed any news about either the missing money or the investigation. This news black-out, inadvertent though it was, would have been a good thing for the law enforcement agency, or agencies, investigating the apparent theft, because the purported thief, whoever he or she may have been, had no way of keeping up with the investigation.

The thing is, the investigators were chasing a nonexistent bad guy all along...about two weeks or so after the crash, the money was found in a safe deposit box in Chicago. 

<***>

One little known fact about Flight 599...it probably wasn't designated as Flight 599, because TWA didn't even use three digit flight numbers back in 1931. On top of that, TWA's transcontinental flights usually used single digit flight numbers. Therefore it's believed that the accrual flight number was 'Flight 5'

A little bit of research actually bore this out...a time-table and flight schedule from that era was located, and the flight covering the route of Knute Rockne's fatal flight was, in fact, numbered 'Flight 5'.

So, just how did it become Flight 599 in just about every article, book, and documentary about the crash for the last half century or so? We'll probably never know for sure.

Maybe someone thought 'Flight 599' sounded more dramatic. Maybe it was the Mother Of All Typos. But for whatever reason, the flight has become known to everyone, including historians as Flight 599, and dozens of authors of everything from magazine articles to books to...well...blog posts has used the wrong flight number, because to use the correct flight number would likely just confuse people. 

<***>

It can't be stressed enough just how beloved Knute Rockne had become by the time he climbed aboard TWA Flight 599, but one telegram pretty much sums the nation's sentiment about Rockne up...one of the telegrams received by Bonnie Rockne was from The Office Of The President Of The United States.

President Herbert Hoover sent a telegram to Bonnie Rockne the morning after the crash...now back in the day, U.S. Presidents didn't generally weigh in on the deaths of prominent figures in sports and entertainment, but Hoover was an avid college football fan, had been equipment manager for Stanford's football team while he attended that university, and was likely both a Knute Rockne, and a Fighting Irish fan (As long as they weren't playing Stanford) as well, so when he heard about Rockne's death while doing presidential things in the Oval Office, it struck a personal chord in a big way.

The telegram he sent to Bonnie Rockne read:

"I know that that every American grieves with you. Mr. Rockne so contributed to a cleanness and high purpose and sportsmanship in athletics that his passing is a national loss."

<***>

While Knute Rockne's death was a great and devastating loss to his family, Notre Dame, College Football, and the nation, we need to remember that he wasn't the only person who died on that cold last day of March in 1931, There were five other passengers and two pilots also aboard the Fokker when it lost a wing and augered in.

Lets take a quick look at Knute Rockne's fellow passengers...the following facts, with my own words added, are another excerpt from Archive Wheeling/A Crash of Coincidences:

Spencer Goldthwaite, a young advertising executive from New York, was flying to California to visit his parents in Pasadena.

Another passenger, wealthy Chicagoan H.J. Christen, had been estranged from his wife, but the two had hashed out their differences, and he was flying to the West Coast for a much-anticipated reconciliation. 

 John Happer, a friend of Rockne's, just happened to be aboard the flight, and was also going to Southern California, to open a new store in the Wilson Sporting Goods chain.

 C.A. Robrecht, a produce merchant from Wheeling, W.Va., was on his way to Amarillo, Texas to attend his grand daughter's funeral, and visit his daughter...the child's namesake and aunt...who had also caught the flu and was in critical condition...This was his first plane trip.

 Waldo B. Miller, of Los Angeles, an executive of the Aetna Insurance Co. who was going home to his family after a sales meeting back East.

Then there were the two pilots...Herman "Jess" Mathias and Robert Fry.

Bob Fry had made the news before, in a far more positive way...he had once made headlines when he crash-landed into a war zone in China and talked his way out. (I looked and couldn't find any further details on this.)

May all of them Rest in Peace

<***>

One of the five passengers aboard Flight 599 had a link to Rockne, even though the two men had never met personally before the day of the crash.

Charles. A. Robrecht, Sr, as I noted above, was flying to Amarillo, Texas in particularly tragic circumstances. His granddaughter, Marguerita, had died of influenza, and his sister...the child's namesake and aunt...had caught it from her and was in critical condition. Mr. Robrecht was on the way to Amarillo to attend little Marguerita's funeral, and to visit his sister. 

He was actually deathly afraid of flying, but had decided, with some urging by relatives, to fly so he could get out to the Texas city more quickly. This would be his first time flying.

Mr. Robrecht was the founder, owner, and president of the  C.A. Robrecht produce company, one of the largest wholesale grocers in West Virginia, so he was not entirely unknown, at least in his home state, but he was, of course, nowhere as near as well known as his legendary fellow passenger.

So what could the two men have had in common? 

First, it was a good bet that Charles Robrecht was a staunch Irish supporter, because his son, Charles Robrecht, Jr., had once taught Chemistry at Notre Dame, and the younger Robrecht had reportedly become close friends with Knute Rockne during his tenure there.

That stop in Kansas City was actually a fueling stop...Flight 599 originated in Columbus, Ohio, which is where Charles Robrecht boarded the flight, so Robrecht was already aboard when Knute Rockne boarded the aircraft. I can imagine Rockne, who was said to be one of those men who became friends with everyone he met, introducing himself, then saying something like ' Robrecht....you didn't have a son who taught at Notre Dame did you?, and the conversation progressing to the reason for Robrecht's trip, with Rockne providing comfort...which brings us to another, far more tragic similarity.

 Robrecht, like Rockne, was a devout Catholic. As is well known, when Knute Rockne's body was found he was clutching a Rosary so tightly that the cross was actually bent. 

Then when all of the bodies were recovered and the area searched, a second rosary was found in the field, near where Robrecht's body had been found....he, like Rockne, had very likely been clutching it, praying, as the Fokker spun in.

<***>

One of the interesting points about Flight 599's crash and Knute Rockne's death is just how fast the news spread across the nation. The plane crashed just before 11:00 AM, it was likely a bit after 11:30 when the ambulance and Dr. Titus arrived on scene and noon or shortly before before one of the Baker brothers found that Knute Rockne was among the deceased. 

Yet just more than an hour later, the Associated Press had the story, and a half hour after that...around 1:30...news commentators were breaking into in-progress radio broadcasts with 'Breaking News' and presses were pumping out Extra Editions reporting the crash and Knute Rockne's unconfirmed death. 

OK, you guys are yelling 'Rob...Dude!... that's like, three hours!!!' but keep in mind that this was 1931. Many homes did not yet have telephones, and none of the electronics we enjoy today, nor the near instantaneous communications they provide, had even been dreamed of yet. Getting information out at all, much less quickly, involved a lot of actual work.

A major reason for the story getting out so quickly was twenty or so miles northeast of the crash site, and right at 26 road-miles distant via Kansas Route 117 and U.S. Route 50, in the bustling little city of Emporia, Kansas.

Emporia, with around 14,800 residents in 1931, was the closest city of any real size to the crash scene, and being the area's 'City', the town had what was probably the most prominent local paper, the Emporia Gazette. Even though The Gazette was just a weekly paper back then, it was no mere 'rag' by any means, but was rather an extremely progressive paper with a well respected owner/Editor In Chief.

The paper was owned and published by the father and son team of William Allen White, and William L. White. The elder White was a journalistic powerhouse, a staunch Republican who was well known and well thought of in political as well as journalistic circles, and a good friend of Teddy Roosevelt, who often stayed over at the White home in Emporia on cross country trips. 

Even more importantly, White also had what members of The Fourth Estate call a nose for news...the then weekly Gazette covered major national stories with the vigor, verve, and energy of a major 'Big City' daily, and here, all of a sudden, they had a major story right in their back yard, so to speak. I can just about guarantee that someone got the ball rolling by calling The Gazette to inform them of the crash, and that the beloved coach was one of the victims. I can only imagine that several things happened at once.

The Associated Press was notified immediately, and even as that long distance phone call was being made, White likely dispatched a news team of reporter and photographer to the scene. This was all done before 1:00 PM, and is why those breaking news stories were hitting the air waves by 1:30.

Three telephone operators were kept busy making and receiving over four hundred long distance phone calls (At $5.50 or so per call. That's $111 and small change per call in today's money.) to and from both coasts, conversing with everyone from other papers and the A.P. to TWA officials and Notre Dame administration to members of the families of the victims, with the total cost of the calls running to the tune of $2000 or so (Around $33,000 today).

What was equally impressive was the quality of reporting from the Gazette itself. Many of the stories published over the week or more after the crash were written by the Whites, and the reporting and writing was described as being profound and eloquent; the reporting, deep and descriptive. I can only imagine that many, if not most, of the Whites' stories went out over the AP wire , to be picked up by other, far larger papers. 

Emporia has doubled in size since that March morning in 1931, is now served by a pair of interstates (I-35 and I-335) as well as U.S. 50 and State Route 99, and is thoroughly modern in all respects. And the Gazette? It's still around, too, now a daily paper, and it's still under control of the White family, with Christopher White Walker...William L White's grandson...at the helm.

<***>

The highly publicized, accidental death of famous people always seems to bring conspiracy theorists out of the woodwork, whether it's today, or ninety-three or so years ago.

That's right...Knute Rockne's death, all but inevitably, spawned a couple of theories about his untimely demise, one of which actually gained a little bit...a very little bit...of traction. Supposedly The Rock, along with the rest of those killed in Flight 599's crash, were the unfortunate victims of an attempted hit ordered by none other than Uber-gangster Al Capone. And the wild thing is, this theory emerged two years after the crash, after the cause had been identified.

According to this theory, Notre Dame priest Father John Reynolds had witnessed the gangland killing of Chicago Tribune reporter John Lingle at a Chicago train station, carried out by Capone hitman and enforcer Leo Brothers on June 9, 1930...except Brothers didn't perform the hit. The murder was actually committed by one of Capone's most trusted assassins, a guy named Frankie Foster. Capone had, supposedly, paid Brothers to take the fall for Foster, and Father Reynolds could testify not only that Brothers wasn't the hitman, but that he had seen Foster put a bullet into the back of Lingle's head. Oh...BTW...Lingle had reputedly been earning a bit of extra income by delivering payments to various and sundry Chicago city officials who were being bribed by Capone (I know...corruption...in Chicago?!?!), and had apparently somehow seriously displeased his side-gig employer.

Capone absolutely did not want to loose Foster's services, and took measures to persuade Father Reynolds that he had not seen what he said he saw. Father Reynolds was directly threatened, both in person and via mail, on several occasions, to the point where he was pretty well traumatized.

On March 27, 1931...four days before Rockne's death...Reynolds took the stand and vaguely testified that Brothers, rather than Foster 'Fit the description' of the assassin.

Supposedly, thinking he was done, Father Reynolds bought a plane ticket, on Flight 599, to fly to L.A. to unwind, but he was then advised that the trial was continuing, and his further testimony would likely be needed.

Then, on the 28th, he ran into Rockne on campus. The two started talking as they walked cross-campus, and Rockne mentioned that he needed to fly to L.A. to meet an obligation in assisting with the filming of 'The Spirit of Notre Dame, but he was having trouble booking a flight.

Father Reynolds immediately offered Rockne his ticket, and Rockne gladly accepted. 

Meanwhile, and supposedly, Capone was taking drastic measures to ensure that Father Reynolds didn't testify further. And, if you believe the story, Flight 599 was blown out of the air three days later, because, supposedly, the plane was brought down by a bomb planted in a suitcase placed aboard in Kansas City...

I can only assume this bomb was alleged to be detonated by a timer of some sort...probably the age-old time-bomb trope, wiring from a battery to the bomb's detonator attached to the hands of a clock in such a way that when those hands reached a certain time, the circuit was completed, and the bomb exploded...

The wild thing is, this theory emerged two years after the crash, and there are people...including Father Reynolds...who believe it. And there was even, looking back, some evidence that supported the story, such as the luggage that was scattered between the severed wing and the main crash, and the fact that the fuselage was broken a few feet forward of the tail.

But the story has a lot of problems. Knute Rockne's trip out to L.A. was actually planned well in advance, and was originally to be via train, from Chicago to L.A. for the entire trip. He changed plans to flying when Doc Nigro suggested that Rockne and his two oldest sons meet him at Kansas City's train station for breakfast. Knute Rockne actually purchased the ticket himself in Chicago...where, as we recall, he was visiting his mother. 

No actual evidence of an explosion was ever found. Nothing. None of the damage to the fuselage seemed to be blast damage, all of it, in fact, appeared to be caused by the impact with the ground at 200 mph. The plane was in a violent spin when it hit, there were some serious forces acting on that steel-tube frame when they hit the ground. The forward part of the fuselage stopped spinning a fraction of a second before the tail...in that fraction of a second the tail ripped loose.

The fuselage was intact as the aircraft was falling...a bomb in the baggage compartment would have blown a steel tube, fabric covered airplane in half...and the parts of the fuselage would have been much farther apart when they hit the ground. Likewise, the bodies would have all probably been ejected several hundred feet in the air, and would have equally likely been several hundred feet apart when they hit the ground/.

And there was the severed wing,  The investigation uncovered severe water damage to the main spar...Anthony Fokker himself identified it. The believers of the 'Bomb Theory' though, insist that the wing spar had no water damage, but was blown apart by the bomb. This of course, doesn't work, because every Fokker F-10 in service was grounded, and checked for...let's all say it together...wing spars delaminating due to water damage. 

It was reported by the theorists that the Bakers heard the plane explode and saw it falling in flames. Several problems with that...the Bakers never saw the plane falling, they heard it...heard the engines wide open, then throttled back, then heard the loud 'THWUNK!!!! of it hitting the ground, and rode to the crash scene, where they found the plane upside down and wrecked, but not on fire, despite the area being soaked with avgas.

Where did this theory come from? It was originally published in the South Bend News-Times (Which went out of business in 1938) on January 7, 1933 and while no other papers published the story, several...including some major papers, such as The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune...took enough interest to make enquiries of The FBI about the purported bomb plot. In reply, The FBI absolutely denied that there was ever any sabotage-related investigation concerning the crash. 

Father Reynolds, decades later, and shortly before his death, refuted much of the story, saying he never gave a ticket to Rockne, but that the Mob killed Rockne to punish him (Father Reynolds) for testifying (????). The general thought is that the elderly Priest wanted to keep the story going because, well, it was a good story. And that is just what it was and is...a story.

Flight 599 crashed due to the wing spar failing because of water damage and air turbulence.

To read more about the Bomb Conspiracy Theory, click HERE  and HERE

<***>

James Easter Heathman...who went by his middle name...is a name well known and well though of by fans of Knute Rockne and The Irish.

On the last day of March in 1931, one week before he turned 14, Easter Heathman's dad called out to him, asking if he wanted to ride with him to see the plane that had just crashed over on the Baker ranch. Easter, being a typical almost 14 year old boy, was probably in the shotgun seat of his dad's Model T Ford before the elder Heathman finished his question

And so the Heathmans bounced across that field towards the shattered air liner, arriving at the scene shortly after the Bakers, before anything, including the five bodies lying on the ground, had been disturbed. Which means he was there when one of those five bodies was I.D.ed as Knute Rockne.

The experience traumatized young Heathman to some extent, and when a memorial to Knute Rockne and the rest of Flight 599's passengers was erected at the site of the crash four years later, in 1935, Heathman appointed himself both care-taker and tour guide, tasks which he took on with enthusiasm.

Heathman maintained the monument site for several decades, and while he was at it, he was also instrumental in getting two other markers erected...a historical marker placed on U.S. 50, and a memorial display at the Matfield Green Service Area on the Kansas Turnpike (I-35).

The main memorial, at the crash site, was and is on private property, well over a mile off of the road (Kansas Route 177), so he became the go-between who set up permission to access the site for tours, as well as setting up the once-every-five-years memorial service at the site. In an interview shortly before his death, Heathman estimated he had escorted somewhere around 800 people to the memorial site over the years.

Heathman also became a staunch Fighting Irish fan, enthusiastically supporting them. In recognition of his support of the team and the school, as well as his dedication to Rockne's memory, Notre Dame  awarded him an honorary monogram at a pep rally in 2006.

Heathman was interviewed in December 2007, just over a month before his death, and remained as low key, and down to earth as he'd been all of his life. When asked how he felt about being somewhat of a a celebrity, he simply stated that he wasn't a celebrity...just an old farmer.

Heathman was 90 years old when he died at of pneumonia in an Emporia, Kansas hospital on January 29th, 2008.

The property where the memorial's located has since changed hands, and the property owners have removed all permissions to access the site unless very special arrangements are made. Those every-five-year memorial services aren't even held there any more, but rather at the Chase County Historical Society Museum in nearby Cottonwood Falls, which hosts an extensive display on Knute Rockne and the crash.

Long-time Knute Rockne Memorial caretaker James Easter Heathman standing near the memorial, several years before his death in 2008. Heathman maintained the memorial, kept the grass cut around it, and escorted visitors to the site for more than half a century. While he was at it, he also was instrumental in getting two other memorials...a historic marker on U.S.50, and a display at the Matfield Green Service Area on the Kansas Turnpike put in place.

This is actually the backside of the memorial, which was erected in 1935. The memorial was erected on the exact spot where the Fokker's crushed cockpit lay after the crash, the small pile of stones in the foreground is where Knute Rockne's body was found. As the memorial is situated on an active cattle ranch, the rail fence was installed to prevent curious cows from damaging the memorial. It's said that ranch hands still occasionally find small parts of the wrecked Fokker F-10 just beneath the ground.

The front of the memorial, described as a granite obelisk with the names of the crash victims engraved on the front side...a simple, yet powerful and moving memorial to the crash victims. There are also eight crosses in front of the monument itself representing the victims. This pic may have been taken during one of the memorial services, as a floral replica of the Notre Dame monogram is seen in front of the memorial.

The land where the monument sits changed hands recently, and the new land owners won't give permission for anyone to visit the memorial unless it's obtained by special arrangement. The memorial services....held annually for years before going to every five years in the mid-90s...are now held at the Chase  County Historical Society museum in Cottonwood Falls.

Close-up of the front face of the monument itself, showing the inscription memorializing the crash victims. 

Bust of Knute Rockne located at the Matfield Green Service Area on the Kansas Turnpike, with a brass plaque telling of both his career and his death, affixed to the pedestal supporting the bust. Easter Heathman was also instrumental in getting this memorial to Rockne put in place.

<***>

While the Knute Rockne memorial at at the crash site is the best known memorial by far, there were several other memorials to the beloved coach, including one in his birth city of Voss, Norway, where both a larger than life size statue of the coach and a commorative plaque memorializing him were put in place.

Statue of Knute Rockne in his birthplace of Voss, Norway. His parents 

moved to Chicago...which Rockne considered his hometown...when he was

five years old 

Commemorative plaque dedicated to Knute Rockne, also located in Voss, Norway

There were several other statues, busts, and plaques erected across the country to memorialize him. Studebaker introduced a car named The Rockne in 1932, which was sold for two model years ('32 and '33) before The Great Depression killed it off.

A town in Texas was named after him as well...Rockne, Texas, near Austin, is an unincorporated community of around 400 people. It was renamed at the behest of the town's school children in 1931, shortly after the beloved coach died.

Numerous streets have been named for the Coach...needless to say, there is one in South Bend...a main residential street, running diagonally for about a mile between McKinley Street on it's southwest end and the intersection of Corby Blvd and North Ironwood Drive on it's northeast end.

The Chase County Historical Society Museum, at 303 Broadway Street in Cottonwood Falls, has one entire room dedicated to the crash, chock full of items from the crash scene.

<***> Links<***>

There were a slew of links for this one, many of them choc full of interesting tidbits and factoids. When I have that many good, solid links, it creates an interesting problem...just which ones do I share.

If I posted every link to every page about Knute Rockne and Notre Dame Football during his tenure as head coach, the list of links would run into multiple pages, so I'm keeping it to links to sites and pages about the crash and Knute Rockne's death with one or two exceptions. 

Even with that limit in place, I have over a page of links, so I'm going to post the best dozen, or maybe fifteen, plus a couple of links to specific points of fact. So, without further ado...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1931_Transcontinental_%26_Western_Air_Fokker_F-10_crash   The Obligatory Wiki Page. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knute_Rockne  And while we're at it, Knute Rockne's Wiki page.

https://kansaspublicradio.org/commentaries-news/2019-03-23/remembering-knute-rockne-and-his-fatal-flight-in-the-flint-hills-88-years-ago    Transcript of a Kansas Public Radio podcast about the crash from March 2019...pretty decent read.

https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/26427913/knute-rockne-funeral-dawn-new-american-experience   Absolutely awesome article on ESPN's website about the CBS live broadcast of the funeral...but that's not all. The article is absolutely loaded with information about the funeral, the trip itself, and lots more. Very comprehensive, well researched and well written.

https://havechanged.blogspot.com/2014/03/twa-flight-599.html  Very interesting and comprehensive Blog Post about the crash on the 'Things Have Changed' blog. A good summary of Rockne's career that includes a clip of Ronald Reagan as George Gipp in what may be his best known scene as an actor, saying arguably the most famous line from Knute Rockne All American.

 This is also one of those blogs that make it real easy to loose yourself, and a couple of hours, while consuming rainy-day munchies and reading on a rainy afternoon. The blog's owner covers a huge  variety of subjects, all very intelligently, comprehensively, and readably....go over to the Blog Archive and list of topics on the left side of the page and I guarantee you'll find something that interests you

https://dodlithr.blogspot.com/2011/11/wooden-wing-failure-in-1931-twa-flight.html  Another short but interesting blog post, from Exo-Cruiser, about the crash. Includes a YouTube clip of a Fokker F-10. 

This blog touches the tech-geek in all of us. The post archive is choc full of posts on aircraft, space craft, vehicles, and electronics. Another 'Loose yourself on a rainy day' pick, big time!

https://125.nd.edu/moments/the-last-flight-of-knute-rockne/   Post about the crash and Knute Rockne's  funeral on the Notre Dame Department of Athletics site. Includes a You Tube clip of Ara Parseghian, ND head coach from 1964-1974, recounting hearing of Knute Rockne's death as a child.

https://clickamericana.com/media/newspapers/knute-rocknes-twa-airplane-crashes-1931  Interesting site containing the transcripts of several of the literally thousands of newspaper articles about the crash and Knute Rockne's death.

https://www.archivingwheeling.org/blog/a-crash-of-coincidences  Very comprehensive and interesting article from the Wheeling, West Virginia history website 'Archiving Wheeling', about the death of prominent Wheeling wholesale grocer C.A.Robrecht, who died in the crash. The article notes several parallels with Rockne, as well as a connection that the two men had...a very interesting read.

https://ndnation.com/boards/showpost.php?b=football;pid=487977;d=all  Post on the Notre Dame football forum 'Rock's House' by someone whose grandparents were friends with Knute and Bonnie Rockne. This is a truly cool read, and the replies are just as awesome. Absolutely loaded with interesting facts about the Rockne's, the funeral, and the stadium.

https://www.indystar.com/story/sports/college/notre-dame/2020/09/23/knute-rocknes-last-equipment-manager-left-letters-notre-dame-coach/5796320002/  Yet another extremely interesting article, this one the story of Knute Rockne's last equipment manager and the letters from Rockne that he kept, found by his son after his death.

https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/90-years-after-his-death-knute-rocknes-life-and-legacy-reverberate-in-a-small-kansas-town/  Interesting and comprehensive site about the Knute Rockne exhibit in the Chase County Historical Society Museum in Cottonwood Falls, Easter Heathman's daughter, Sue Ann Brown, who took over keeping Rockne's legacy alive after her dad's death in 2008, as well as Rockne's son and grandson. A truly interesting as well as moving read.

https://tinyurl.com/5dka32k9 Short but very interesting article from Notre Dame magazine about Knute Rockne's gravesite

https://magazine.nd.edu/stories/the-things-he-carried/  Another Notre Dame Magazine online article about the significance of the rosary, along with other items, that Knute Rockne was carrying when he died

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/887/knute-rockne  Knute Rockne's Find-A-Grave page

https://www.5thdowncfb.com/post/pop-rocks-pop-warner-knute-rockne-threatened-to-quit-to-get-new-stadiums-at-pitt-and-notre-dame   Extremely interesting, informative, and readable article about just how Notre Dame Stadium...The House That Rockne Built...came to be.

https://magazine.nd.edu/stories/echoes-rockne-and-the-four-horsemens-last-ride/  Yet another extremely interesting article from Notre Dame Magazine, this one about the charity game that was the very last game Knute Rockne ever coached.

https://magazine.nd.edu/stories/sculpting-rockne/  Awesome Notre Dame magazine article by Jerry McKenna, Notre Dame Class of 1962, and sculptor extraordinaire, about his sculpture of Knute Rockne, which stands outside of the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, as well as a second sculpture that he cast and donated to Knute Rockne's birthplace of Voss, Norway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_of_Notre_Dame The Spirit Of Notre Dame's Wiki page...

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022422/  ...And Internet Movie Database page