A brief video from the 40th Anniversary Memorial Service for AA Flight 191

This from Drew Smith:

Part of the area where Flight 191 crashed had several Quonset huts from the former Orchard Field (where O’Hare gets its “ORD” from). In one of those huts was Andy’s Auto Repair. In Des Plaines, my father operated Lee’s Brake and Clutch, an auto parts and machine shop. Andy was a loyal customer. I had made deliveries to Andy working for my father. Earlier in that fateful day my father had made a delivery to Andy. Speed ahead to 2009, the year my father died. I was cleaning out the shop when my brother asked if I knew what this was about showing me the attached invoice hanging on the wall on a small clipboard, the type we use for those deliveries. It brought back memories of that day.

I had taken in the crash as a high school senior preparing to graduate. I had completed the High School District 214 Fire Cadet program conducted by the Mount Prospect FD. Back then you could buff or fan a fire with your own gear and find work to do. Not this time. Once the main fire was out there wasn’t much left.

The area of the crash was in the Elk Grove Township Fire Protection District and they had just went into operation as a FD in January of the same year, not even six months in operation.  I was passing DPFD Station 3 (now 63) and saw the header. 61, 71, and 81 were all still in quarters. I thought it might be a tank farm fire as there had been a couple of them in the late 1970s. I turned onto Mount Prospect Road and started heading towards the header. Soon the rigs from Station 3 were passing me.  As I got closer I still didn’t know what had happened but I knew it wasn’t a tank farm fire. I pulled up near the Chicago PD’s K-9 facility on Touhy Ave. adjacent to the crash site. I parked on the opposite side of the road and saw probably the most smoke I’ve ever seen, but not for long.  

To this day, I vividly remember seeing the ARFF rigs (back then they were called CFR – Crash Fire Rescue) from O’Hare coming closer at a good pace. They barely slowed and drove into the tall chain link and barbed wire fence surrounding the K-9 facility and started to discharge their agent. When the smoke began to clear it was a scorched earth, Quonset huts and vehicles in that area reduced to a heap, and other than a few large components of the aircraft not much else. Nearly all of the fuselage was gone. I will refrain from describing the human remains that were present.

I have the original invoice stored with my many keepsakes. I’ll never know why my dad kept it hanging there all those years.

Strangely, there was another Flight 191 crash at DFW in 1985. In that incident 27 of the 164 souls on board lived.

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