A Terrible April Day in 1977

The headline on The Birmingham News the next day proclaimed it Black Monday. The date was Monday, April 4, 1977. I was a freshman at Huffman High School. I was the only person in the student body that was carrying a Weather Radio. My seventh period civics teacher made me turn it off, even as a black cloud was bearing down on us from the southwest. Even as the dismissal bell was ringing, the tornado bell started to sound. We learned on the way home that a tornado had touched down on the western side of Birmingham, and had tossed cars off I-65. As the afternoon wore on, it became apparent that a significant disaster had occurred in the Smithfield Estates area just off highway 78. A total of 22 people died in the F5 tornado that cut a fifteen mile path from just northwest of downtown to near Tarrant around 3 p.m.

About that same time, Southern Airways Flight 242, a DC-9 jet with 82 people on board crash landed on Georgia Highway 381 in the small northwest Georgia community of New Hope. A total of 63 passengers and crew members died, along with 9 people on the ground as the plane skidded along the highway. The aircraft, enroute from Huntsville to Atlanta, ran into a severe thunderstorm near Rome, Georgia at about 17,000 feet. Power was lost in both engines after tremendous amounts of hail and rain were ingested into the engines. The engines could not be restarted after being severely damaged and the crew had to attempt an emergency landing on the highway. The NTSB concluded that the loss of thrust caused the crash. They also considered that several technological issues contributed to the disaster. Southern Airways flight dispatchers did not alert the crew to the presence of the severe weather. The Air Traffic Control system was not equipped to provided real-time information to the flight crew about the hazardous weather. Finally, the Captain relied on the aircraft’s radar to make his penetration of the thunderstorm.