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 Airport, the site that gave O’Hare its "ORD" code. One of those huts was home to Andy’s Auto Repair. I grew up in Des Plaines, and 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. On the day of the crash, my father had just dropped off a delivery to Andy. Fast forward to 2009, the year my father passed away. While cleaning out the shop, my brother showed me an old invoice hanging on the wall — it was from May 25, 1979, the day of the crash. It brought back a flood of memories.
I was a high school senior at the time, finishing up my Fire Cadet training with the Mount Prospect Fire Department. Back then, we could help out at fires using our own gear. But this was different. By the time I arrived, the main fire was already under control, and there wasn’t much left to do.
The crash site was in the Elk Grove Township Fire Protection District, which had only been operational for about six months when the accident happened. I was passing by DPFD Station 3 (now Station 63) when I saw the emergency response headers: 61, 71, and 81 were all on duty. At first, I thought it might be another tank farm fire, like the ones we’d seen in the late '70s. But as I drove down Mount Prospect Road toward the scene, the rigs from Station 3 started passing me. The closer I got, the more I realized it wasn’t a typical fire. I pulled over near the Chicago Police K-9 facility on Touhy Avenue, just across from the crash site.
I remember seeing the most smoke I'd ever seen, but it cleared quickly. Then I saw the ARFF units — they were called CFRs back then — rushing in from O’Hare. They didn’t slow down as they smashed through the chain-link fence surrounding the K-9 facility and began discharging their foam. When the smoke cleared, the area was completely scorched. The Quonset huts, cars, and parts of the plane were reduced to rubble. The fuselage was mostly gone. I won’t describe what I saw of the human remains, but it was deeply disturbing.
I still have that original invoice saved among my keepsakes. I never understood why my dad kept it on the wall for so long.
Interestingly, there was another Flight 191 crash at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport in 1985. In that incident, 27 of the 164 passengers survived.
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