Today in History – June 5, 1956 – F-89 Scorpion hits automobile on aborted takeoff.

5 June 1956 – A USAF Northrop F-89 Scorpion fighter jet of the 18th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron armed with 104 live rockets, struck an automobile during an aborted take-off at Wold-Chamberlain Field, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Both F-89 crew members survive but three of the five occupants of the automobile are killed. (1)

Minneapolis was no stranger to aircraft accidents.

“On March 7, 1950, Northwest-Orient Airlines Flight 307 collided with a flagpole at Fort Snelling. Damaged, the plane circled back around and smashed into a home off Minnehaha Parkway. Two people on the ground were killed, as were all 10 passengers and three crewmembers.

Four days after the F-89 incident, on June 9, 1956, a Grumman F-9F Panther, fully loaded with ordnance, fell out of formation and crash-landed across three houses on 46th Avenue, causing an enormous explosion and killing the pilot and six people on the ground.

Incredibly, yet a third military aviation disaster occurred less than a year after that, on Memorial Day in 1957 in Northeast Minneapolis. Two Navy planes collided in midair, killing one pilot and setting four houses ablaze near Sunset Memorial Cemetery.” (2)

Source: (1) Wikipedia; (2)MinnPost, Remembering the Twin Cities’ four aviation disasters in the 1950s, By Andy Sturdevant, August 17, 2016

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