“I had my two-year-old son and my wife, and we hopped in the car and went up Highway 99,” said Ron Palmer, a retired man who lives near Seattle. “ I was on swing shift at Boeing, and I just had to see it.”
What Ron Palmer had to see was the aftermath of the crash of a brand-new Boeing 707 jetliner. The aircraft, which was being used to train airline pilots, had gone down north of Seattle late one autumn afternoon in 1959.
Ron went to see the crash site, and he brought his camera along.
Visiting The Crash Site The Next Day
“I was fortunate to walk right up to the river’s edge,” Palmer said. “It was on a kind of a berm or a dike or something. I stood there and took some pictures with my little camera. I don’t think I was there more than 10 minutes.”
More than 65 years later, Ron Palmer’s photos of the crash are a stark reminder of what remains an unusual disaster and outlier in aviation history: the only time a Boeing jetliner has crashed in the aerospace manufacturer’s home state of Washington.
A Routine Training Flight
The Boeing 707 jetliner took off that day from Boeing Field in Seattle for what was supposed to be a routine training flight. On board were four employees of Braniff Airlines, a representative from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and three men who worked for Boeing, the manufacturer of the jetliner.
It wasn’t too much later, somewhere in the skies high above rural Snohomish County, when something went terribly wrong. A Braniff pilot named Jack Berke, who was learning how to operate the new jet, lost control during what should have been an uneventful procedure: recovering from a “Dutch Roll.”
Within moments of Berke’s misstep, three of the 707’s four engines were torn from its wings, and the jetliner caught fire. In the cockpit, a Boeing pilot named Russ Baum struggled to regain control and to aim the jet toward Paine Field in nearby Everett, Wash. for an emergency landing.
But the jetliner was losing altitude too fast. Within a few minutes, the 707 crash-landed along the bank of the Stillaguamish River a few miles west of the small town of Oso, Wash. The forward section of the aircraft was crushed on impact and burst into flames. Four men, including the Boeing and Braniff pilots, died in the cockpit; four other men on board who had moved to the rear and braced for impact miraculously survived.
Unfortunately, the crash of the Braniff Airlines 707 didn’t have to happen. Investigators later determined that a Boeing pilot – whose job was to teach the Braniff pilots about the plane – broke the rules about how to administer the Dutch Roll exercise, and also didn’t properly instruct the Braniff pilots on the steps required to properly recover from the maneuver. These two factors led directly to the loss of the plane.
“Oh boy. Here we go.”
Albert “Pete” Krause was a flight engineer for Braniff. He on board the 707 that day, in the cockpit, observing from a jumpseat at the back, when everything went wrong.
“Jack Berke was a good guy, but he just, I don’t know,” Krause said. “I saw that left knee go down [on the control pedal], and I thought, ‘Oh boy. Here we go.’”
Pete Krause and three others survived the crash; Jack Berke, Russ Baum and two others did not.
“[The crash] broke my back, and I still have a lot of back problems,” Krause said, “but I was able to finish my career flying, and the good Lord has smiled on me. I’m a happy camper.”
Deadly Crash a “Sad and Extraordinary Footnote”
The Boeing 707 is one of the most consequential aircraft ever designed and built by the aerospace giant, but its success wasn’t necessarily a given when the first prototype was revealed in a public “rollout” ceremony in 1954. From the time it went into service in 1959, other 707s crashed around the United States and in other parts of the world, often killing many passengers and crew members on board.
Still, though only four men died, the October 1959 crash – in Boeing’s backyard – remains a sad and extraordinary footnote in aerospace history and Pacific Northwest history.