40th Anniversary Memorial Service for AA Flight 191 (more)
A short video from the 40th Anniversary Memorial Service for American Airlines Flight 191
This story comes from Drew Smith:
Part of the area where Flight 191 crashed once housed several Quonset huts from the old Orchard Field, the site that gave O’Hare Airport its "ORD" code. One of those huts was home to Andy’s Auto Repair. In Des Plaines, my father ran Lee’s Brake and Clutch, a local auto parts and machine shop. Andy was a regular customer, and I used to make deliveries for my dad to his shop. On that tragic day, my father had just dropped off a delivery to Andy before the crash happened.
Fast forward to 2009, the year my father passed away. While cleaning out the shop with my brother, he showed me an old invoice hanging on a small clipboard on the wall—just like the ones we used for those deliveries. It brought back memories of that day, decades later.
I was a high school senior at the time of the crash, preparing to graduate. I had completed the Fire Cadet program through High School District 214, run by the Mount Prospect Fire Department. Back then, we could practice with our own Gear and help out at the station. But this was different. When the main fire died down, there wasn’t much left to do.
The crash site was in the Elk Grove Township Fire Protection District, which had only just started operating as a fire department in January of that same year—less than six months in service. As I drove past DPFD Station 3 (now Station 63), I saw the emergency response numbers: 61, 71, and 81 were all still in quarters. At first, I thought it might be a tank farm fire, as there had been a few of those in the late 1970s. But when I turned onto Mount Prospect Road and headed toward the scene, I realized something was wrong.
As I got closer, I saw the fire trucks from Station 3 passing me quickly. I pulled up near the Chicago Police Department's K-9 facility on Touhy Avenue, right next to the crash site. I parked on the opposite side of the road and was stunned by the amount of smoke—so thick, so dark, and so fast-moving. It didn’t last long, though.
Then I saw the ARFF rigs from O’Hare coming in fast. They barely slowed as they smashed through the chain-link and barbed wire fence surrounding the K-9 facility. They sprayed their agent, and when the smoke cleared, it was a scorched wasteland. The Quonset huts and vehicles in the area were reduced to heaps, and most of the plane’s fuselage was gone. Only a few large parts of the aircraft remained. I won’t describe what I saw of the human remains.
I still have that original invoice saved among my keepsakes. I never figured out why my dad kept it hanging there for so many years.
Interestingly, there was another Flight 191 crash in 1985 at DFW, where 27 of the 164 people on board survived.
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