This crash happened just after my tenth birthday, and I remember seeing this picture in the papers back then. Through the years, I can't count how many nightmares I've had where I hear the sound of a plane falling, I look up, and I see the same picture as the plane crashes right in front of me. Seeing the picture again now is beyond eery.

--Mark

I was in Junior High School in Bartlett, Illinois the day that Flight 191 crashed. Bartlett is about 25 miles from O'Hare. I remember leaving school the day of the crash and we could see the smoke from the front of the school! Couldn't figure out exactly what it was, figured it was a house burning a town or two over. When I got home from school the accident was all over the news. That is one day I will never forget.

--Gary Ewing

If you read a book called "Mysteries Of The Unexplained", there is a guy in that said he had a premonition of that crash. He also said he had nightmares ten nights in a row.

--Anonymous

I was working in Rolling Meadows about 6 miles from O'Hare. We heard about the crash but I lived north. I remember driving down Lake-Cook Road and just being fixated on the smoke, just thinking about the souls that were consumed in that smoke.

--Rick

I was 8 years old, walking home to our trailer, when I witnessed the plane crash. I lived on Elmhurst Road in the Oasis Mobile Home Trailer Park. I distinctly did two things different that day. 1) I saved the potato chips from my packed lunch to eat on the way home from, 2)the other bus stop I would get off at for the first time. In retrospect, my mom would have been furious to know I did both. But as it happens, the other bus stop was in the back of the trailer park, and my walk home to the front was directly toward O'Hare. I am 33 now, and can still see it vividly in my imagination: Looking down at the chips as my hand reached into the plastic ziploc, and watching them rumble as I heard an explosion. I quickly looked up to see a line of black smoke rising up toward an airplane turned sideways, that was in the process of falling from the sky.

When the plane hit, I could hear the metal twisting along with the biggest explosion I had ever seen at that age. The cloud was enormous and everything stood still. I ran inside our trailer and callled my mom who was still at work, and broke the story. (My early work as a journalist) She interrupted me for a moment, to catch the breaking news on tv. She told me to wait, and she came home immediatley. We walked along Elmhurst road, a 4-6 lane road if memory serves, and saw in the field tons of seat belts and seat cushions. People had crossed the police tape so they could loot whatever valuables they could find. I saw people putting things in their pockets. It was tragic event, but in a weird way, I'm glad I experienced it. (Except for the dreams that I am in a plane as it begins to go down).

I drive alongside Newark Liberty International airport twice daily, and watch every plane I can take off and land, in case I see it again. A coworker told me I had a "Better chance of being struck by lightning" before I saw another plane crash. Fortunatley, I haven't been struck by lightning. Unfortunately though, I did see flight #175 crash into the south World Trade Center the beautiful sunny morning of 9/11.

--BillyD

I was four years old when this happened and my dad was a Mount Prospect cop. This one of his first major calls he went on. I still have the actual police photos of this crash.

--Niccie

I would like to share with you briefly why I am so affected by this. Since I was a young child I've had a passion for flying. I wanted more than anything to fly. I used to spend much of my time watching the airplanes. My father would even park our car near the end of the runways (when we still could) so I could watch the planes. Around the time of the crash, my mother had been occasionally flying in and out of O'Hare mostly on DC-10's with other family members. I spent quite a bit of time at O'Hare at my young age--just before my 8th birthday and the AA 191 crash was exactly on my mother's birthday, May 25th.

In 1986 I had the privilege of flying on a DC-10 both ways--American Airlines from O'Hare to LAX and back. The flight numbers were 181 and 192.

I remember the tragedy like it was yesterday and one night in June last year I suddenly had a nightmare about the crash--as if I saw it directly. Since that time, something has told me that I really need to go the crash site and say goodbye to those lost, like I lost something so dear to me.

--D.Durgin

I will never forget FLT191. I was 10 at the time and living in Des Plaines. It was 3:00 on a Fri, and my classmates and I were anxious for the bell to ring at 3:20p in anticipation of Memorial Day weekend. Our 4th grade classroom faced south towards O'Hare and I recall glancing out the windows and seeing a silver object briefly glimmer in the sun. Seconds later there was a thick pillar of black smoke. I recall us asking our teacher what it was, and she replied that there was an incinerator burning garbage in the industrial area of Elk Grove Village, towards the airport.

Years later I would wonder if she really knew, and not knowing how to explain it to a classroom of kids, offered up a quick answer. After school, I would come home and find my mom standing in our backyard looking in the direction of the crash. My dad, working only a couple miles from the crash site, would arrive home an hour or so later than usual because of traffic delays. He would later recall the smell of burning flesh and kerosene in the air, even from a couple miles away! I was so shocked by what I had seen that I stayed up all night listening to radio coverage, not able to fall asleep.

--Anonymous

I remember being at home in Tennessee when Roger Mudd from CBS news broke in on local programming to announce that an American Airlines DC-10 had crashed in Chicago on take-off. I was 16 at the time and was planning a trip with my Mom a few months later. Later on that night, the news pictures showed the real horror of what had happened. As an aviation buff and private pilot now, I will always remember that day as one of those "You knew what you were doing when you got the news" events. My mom and I still went on the trip, but those people on that plane who died and those two on the ground did fly that day - all the way to heaven.

--AWK

I had just come home from Plum Grove Junior High when I saw a large plume of smoke in the distance. I remember Walter Jacobson talking about how the thrust of the engine that stayed on the plane counteracting the lighter weight of the side that had lost the engine - causing the rollover. We went to Taiwan that summer, and on our stop back from Seattle to Chicago, we took a DC-10 back home. I'm enthralled now by the engineering disasters on the History Channel's Modern Marvels, and this is a case where the plane was built well, but the maintenance crew by using a shortcut, caused a major disaster. I read that a big problem was that when the crew went to lunch, the hydraulics holding the engine and pylon assembly actually sagged a bit, causing the stress that eventually led to the fatal crash of 1979.

--Charles L

I am going to watch the story of this crash in a few minutes on History Channel. I vaguely remember it happening, but I do remember hearing recently, that it was caused by human error.  Thus, I want to watch it.

The reason I chose to reply to your/this msg. is because I felt stabs of sickening pain in my stomach when I read the part about people crossing the tape and looting - putting things in their pockets.

I saw an accident, well sort of, near my home when I was a teenager in 1978. It was on a Saturday night in winter. I was just getting home from dropping off my date to a school dance. I was driving east toward the mountains, when all of sudden the sky lit up bright orange, then slowly went back dark. The skies were cloudy almost to the ground, like fog. However, there was about 200 feet of clearance to the cloud ceiling. So when the sky lit up, it was nearly impossible to tell where the light had come from. Since I was in my car I heard nothing. The next morning is when we learned about what had happened.

Well, the plot thickens... Monday at school half a dozen of the guys that hung-out in the parking lot ("Burnouts" was their nomenclatures), were all arrested by a bunch of FBI looking dudes. They all were arrested at the same time and it made a huge scene. Basically, school was a joke the rest of the day.

 Apparently, this group of Einstein’s heard the plane hit the side of the mountain and all hauled butt up the Baer canyon (weird spelling). Not only did they find the crash site, they did it hours before the official search and rescue people.

This should have been a very quick and easy find and rescue. Except there was no one to rescue. They all (3 of them) dies on impact. It was a contracted airline to haul mail. They were loaded to the nuts with Christmas packages... and mail. Since the cloud level was so low, and the mountain was so high, the plane got turned around and thought they were headed west out over the valley, dropping down to land at Salt Lake International, SLC, Utah, but in fact, were headed east straight in to the mountain side at about 6500 ft above sea level, the mountain goes to around 9000 ft above sea level right there.  Anyway, needless to say at this point in the story, they went headfirst at "throttles on" speed, right in to the mountainside. We could see the main hole, and the four smaller holes, (two on each side of big hole), for years later. Especially in the spring when the fresh green grass started growing after snow melt.

Back to the Burnout Einstein’s. They started looting everything they could get in there backpacks, especially cash in letters, before they headed back down the mountain. I guess they stayed there until it started to get light. So when they were leaving the site some "G-men" saw them sneaking over the hill and heading down the mountain. Somehow they avoided getting nabbed, even dodging helicopters. (Remember this was in the Super70s technology). One of the parents found the bounty stashed in the garage Monday morning and called the FBI. So after a quick bit of detective work, the big "take-down" took place at school.'

It is not Flight 191, but it is a story/memory trigged by the story of flight 191. Since the posts in here are all so old, I do not think anyone is going to mind too awfully much. I hope it gives someone a kick reading about the Christmas Plane Crash of 78’ in Baer Canyon (Utah).

Finally, I can watch the story of Flight 191 now on The History Channel. Maybe I will be able to have memory about it then.

Dude