We journeyed to New Hope, Georgia. Dallas, Georgia, really. Dallas is a narrow spot on a road. New Hope doesn’t appear on a map. It is between here and there, Chattanooga and Atlanta, west of Marietta. To be such a small place a lot has happened here. We were there for a memorial of the crash of Southern Airways 242. My grandfather died on that flight, the largest aviation disaster in Georgia history. This, then, is thought to be one of the longest-running memorials of its kind in the country. I wrote about it a few years ago, and a version of that also landed on the Smithsonian Magazine’s site.
The plane touched down and crashed just down from this church:
On Monday, April 4, 1977, at 4:18 in the afternoon, a Huntsville to Atlanta DC 9 Jetliner crashed into the small community of New Hope, northeast of Dallas, Georgia. The jet plane’s first contact with the ground was about fifty yards from the New Hope First Baptist Church. A piece of the plane’s metal fell on the church property. This was on the same ground that the great battle of New Hope was fought on May 25, 1864, when so many lives were lost. There were eighty-two passengers and crew aboard the Southern Airways plane and at least sixty-one passengers lost their lives. Eight local residents perished due to the accident. Two of these were members of the New Hope First Baptist Church.
This happened during a thunderstorm. It was a dark rainy afternoon and strange as it may seen, this was the type weather that was described on May 25, 1864.
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The aircraft hit in the middle of the 92 Highway then seemed to shift with the wind, clipping power poles, electric lines and cutting trees as it went. It was kept closely between the many stores, New Hope Elementary School and the volunteer fire station and was seemingly under control when suddenly the plane touched down in front of Newman’s Grocery Store where two gas pumps were hit, causing an explosion.
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Residents all around were bringing out sheets, blankets and anything they could to help, trying to provide and assist as best they could. Some helped in pulling the injured from the wreckage, putting them in their cars and for Paulding Memorial Hospital.
According to the hospital’s timeline, the first victims arrived just 10 minutes after the crash.
The accident investigation ultimately concluded that everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The storm the plane flew into was so thick that it swallowed radar signatures, so their equipment didn’t see it. The hail cracked the cockpit windshield and cause complete engine failure. The air traffic controllers made some critical errors, too. Ultimately the two pilots, Captain William W. McKenzie and First Officer Lyman Keele, who were accomplished military aviators had to try a desperation landing on a country road. Eyewitnesses say they put the landing gear down on the centerline of the road, but the wings clipped the poles and they lost control from there. One of the last battles before Sherman burned Atlanta took place there 103 years prior. And evidence suggests that before that, apparently, there was a great Native American conflict there, too. All of this in one cursed spot.
The wooded area bordered a house where a mother and her children who had been playing outside just moments before. I know one of those guys, and his mother. Sweet lady. Just behind what was then their home is the site of the Civil War battle, a place called Hell Hole. The locals brought survivors through the lady’s house, in the front door, out the back, down through the woods and to another road behind them. That was the only way they could get cars to the site, through the debris. Every crash victim who went in through her front door survived.
One of the local facilities has a display of contemporary newspapers:
