Sabena flight 548
Sabena flight 548, flight of a Boeing 707 airliner that crashed on February 15, 1961, in Brussels, killing all 72 people on board and one person on the ground. The entire U.S. figure skating team was on the flight, and their deaths have become most associated with this disaster.
The 1961 U.S. Figure Skating Championships were the first to be televised nationwide, on the CBS Sports Spectacular, and by the end of the broadcast many skaters had become household names. There was publicity and fanfare as the team, along with a large entourage of coaches and family, headed to the World Championships in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Watching them as they posed for photographs on the steps of Sabena flight 548 at New York City’s Idlewild Airport (now the John F. Kennedy International Airport), nobody could have dreamed it was to be the last their admiring public would see of them. The plan was to fly to Brussels and then catch a connecting flight to Prague.
Sabena, the Belgian national airline flying the team, had been making trans-Atlantic flights since 1946. Flight 548 was on a fairly new Boeing 707-329 aircraft with a crew of 11, led by Captain Ludovic Marie Antoine Lambrechts and First Officer Jean Roy, and 61 passengers, including the 18 figure skaters and their entourage. The flight across the Atlantic Ocean was routine. About 20 minutes before the flight’s expected landing, the air traffic controllers reported difficulties with radio communication but these were resolved. When the plane was on its final approach to its designated runway, there was a smaller aircraft that had just landed on that runway but not yet cleared it, and the Sabena pilot initiated a go-around. Problems emerged during the maneuver, however, and the pilots had trouble preventing the plane’s nose from pitching up. They circled three times in an attempt to safely land but finally lost all ability to control the descent. The plane came down in a nearby field and immediately burst into flames, killing all on board as well as a farmer tending his fields.
The definitive cause of the crash remains unknown, but the most likely explanation is believed to be a failure of a mechanism in the tail stabilizer. Boeing responded to the findings by adding stabilizer trim cut-out switches to existing and future planes. The crash had a devastating effect on the tight-knit skating community, and the national championships in Prague were canceled. Among the dead was the nine-times U.S. ladies’ champion Maribel Vinson together with her two daughters.