Marshall Plane

Marshall University Plane Crash

Huntington Herald Advertiser

November 15, 1970

Marshall Team, Coaches, Fans Die In Plane Crash

75 Believed Aboard Plane; Airline Silent

A chartered jet airliner carrying the Marshall University football team, coaches and a number of prominent Huntington residents crashed in flames on its approach to Tri-State Airport Saturday evening.

There were no survivors.

Southern Airways of Atlanta, Ga., said its two-engine DC-9 was carrying 70 passengers and five crewmen.

The plane was returning the Marshall football players, most of the coaching staff and a group of supporters from Greenville, N. C., where East Carolina University defeated the Marshall team Saturday afternoon.

The crash occurred about 7:45 p. m. less than a mile west of Tri-State Airport. Weather conditions were poor and light rain was falling.

The Herald-Advertiser's Jack Hardin, the first reporter at the scene some 250 yards east of W. Va. 75 south of Kenova, said:

"There's nothing here but charred bodies. It's terrible."

Bodies and wreckage were scattered over a wide area.

Gov. Arch A. Moore Jr. and Dr. Donald N. Dedmon, Marshall's acting president, rushed to the scene.

Hardin reported a piece of the plane was found on a hillside about a half-mile from the principal crash site. He said sections of bodies also were reported found there, too. Searchers were combing the hillside early this morning with the aid of flares.

At 12:10 a. m., the first bodies were placed on National Guard trucks. They were being taken to the National Guard Armory at the airport, where a temporary morgue was established. Hardin said recovery crews were running short of bags to hold the bodies.

Southern Airways at Atlanta said it did not have a passenger list, and refused to identify the crewmen pending notification of next of kin.

The tragedy was "the worst domestic air crash this year," a Federal Aviation Agency spokesman in Washington said, and it was described as one of the worst in history involving an athletic team.

The crash also was the worst in West Virginia air travel history.

Charles Dodrill, president of Tri-State Airport Authority, said if the plane were in its normal approach pattern coming into the airport, it would have had its nose slightly up, traveling at a speed of about 160 miles an hour at the point where it crashed.

A nearby resident, Mrs. Larry Bailey of 1926 Coal Branch Road, told Hardin she saw the jet coming down. She said she heard an explosion and "the plane seemed to come down flat."

The Herald-Advertiser's David A. Peyton reported by radio-telephone that he had walked completely around the scene and "everything is charred beyond belief."

Peyton said it appeared an area about 200 feet in diameter had been leveled and small fires were still burning. He said only the plane's