On a cloudless Saturday evening 50 years ago this week, a Navy bomber carrying eight reservists thundered on a routine training flight out of Los Alamitos Naval Air Station.
A minute later, less than 10 miles away, a four-engine Air Force transport plane took off from Long Beach Municipal Airport on its way to McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. It carried 35 passengers from various military branches and a crew of six.
Less than five minutes after they took off, about half a mile above Norwalk, the planes collided at 7:13 p.m. All but two onboard the planes perished, as did a woman on the ground.
The transport exploded in the air, the tail section slamming into a service station at Firestone and Pioneer boulevards. Another large flaming portion plummeted to the ground across the street, where it exploded in the parking lot of the Norwalk sheriff's station, igniting fuel in an underground storage tank and damaging buildings and cars. Jail inmates, in a panic, screamed to be released, according to news accounts.
As debris fell, 25-year-old Edith Rachel Hernandez dashed out of her Jersey Avenue home to see what was happening -- after making sure her two children were safe inside. She was sliced in half by falling metal, Times reports said.
The two survivors were found at the crumpled fuselage of the bomber, which had plunged into a clay pit in Santa Fe Springs, more than a mile from the collision.
The Feb. 1, 1958 disaster, at the time labeled the worst in Southern California's increasingly crowded skies, sparked a congressional probe and prompted the Navy to ban low-altitude flights from Los Alamitos over the metropolitan area. The cause soon was found to be mainly pilot error, a failure to follow the "see and avoid" mandate of visual flight rules.
The crash brought chilling reminders of another midair collision of military planes over a suburban neighborhood that had occurred a year earlier, when a fighter jet and military transport plane collided above Pacoima Junior High in the San Fernando Valley. That crash killed all five aboard the planes and three students on the playground and injured 70 other people.
The Norwalk collision, whose victims will be honored at a public memorial service Friday by military and city officials, turned quiet streets into scenes of horror and confusion and deeply affected survivors and those who witnessed the destruction.
