Many people sing about “the day music died” on February 3, 1959, when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and JP “The Big Bopper” Richardson died in a plane crash.
Don McLean coined the term in his 1971 hit “American Pie.”
The song, about the decline of the ’60s, begins with the deaths of three young musicians, “the happy end of the ’50s,” he said. forbes magazine.
Investigators say the rapidly changing winter weather conditions were not communicated to the inexperienced pilot as a contributing factor to the crash, which left a tragic mark in music history.
“Shortly after takeoff, Pilot Peterson is believed to have entered an area of complete darkness and no clear horizon. Snow conditions and the lack of a horizon (visibility of the ground) caused the aircraft’s attitude and direction to change. They had to rely solely on their instruments,” wrote the Civil Aviation Commission, which investigated the crash.
Bus ride on Winter Dance Party tour is difficult, musician falls ill
The musicians had just finished part of their “Winter Dance Party” tour on the night of February 2nd at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa.
The 24-day tour began in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and crisscrossed Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa in the dead of winter.
“Organizationally speaking, the tour was a complete disaster. We zigzagged through one of the most dangerous winters the Midwest has seen in decades, and the transportation was terrible, so the shows were close to each other. They were often scheduled hundreds of miles apart.” ballroom website.
“Musicians were crammed into drafty buses to perform in cramped ballrooms and theaters, and by February 1, Carl Bunch (Holly’s drummer) was home with frostbitten feet.”
Holly, the 22-year-old driving force behind the tour, said she was fed up with buses breaking down in freezing temperatures and chartered a four-seater plane to fly to a show in Morehead, Minnesota, the next night. Civil Aviation Commission Accident Report.
Fargo, North Dakota was the closest airport.
The musicians asked guitarist Tommy Allsup and bass guitarist Waylon Jennings to join them.
The tour included Valens, Richardson, Dion and the Belmonts, Frankie Sardo, Jennings, Allsup, and the Bunch.
Valens, 17, had never flown on a small plane before and asked Allsup for a seat, according to the report. Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture.
The two tossed a coin and Valens “won” the seat.
According to the accident report, Jennings gave up his seat to Richardson, who had the flu.
Mr. Jennings said: Country Music Hall of Fame Even if it was a joke, his last conversation with Holly always stuck with him.
When Jennings told Holly he wasn’t going to fly, Holly said, “I hope the dammed bus freezes again.”
Jennings replied, “I hope your plane crashes.”
Deterioration of winter weather conditions
Holly, Valens and Richardson arrived at the airport just after 1:30 a.m.
The weather was 15 degrees and wind chilly at the Mason City, Iowa, airport, with winds blowing at about 36 miles per hour.
A cold front moved from western Minnesota through Nebraska, and a secondary cold front moved across North Dakota, the report said.
The front brought widespread snow and strong winds.
“Depending on temperature and moisture content, moderate to heavy icing and precipitation were present in the clouds along the route,” the report said.
Air traffic controllers gave pilot Roger Peterson, 21, several weather forecasts from 5:30 p.m. until takeoff.
The pilot had been flying for about five years as a contract commercial pilot and flight instructor for the company that owned the plane, headed by Hubert Dwyer.
“He was a young married man who had built his life around flying,” the accident report said.
Two air traffic controllers provided weather forecasts to Peterson. That included the Mason City and Fargo situations and his one waypoint.
Unfortunately, the NWS issued two “emergency advisories” during the night, indicating the situation was deteriorating.
“Neither communicator recalled bringing these emergency advisories to Pilot Peterson’s attention. Mr. Dwyer said that when he accompanied Pilot Peterson to ATCS, He said he was not given any information indicating that he would encounter instrument flight weather on his flight route.
Peters was only certified for visual flight rules or clear weather, not instrument flight rules for flying through clouds.
He passed his written instrument flight test, but failed his practical flight test nine months before the crash.
He logged 52 hours of instrument training, all done using a conventional artificial horizon instrument, Gyro Horizon.
Gyro horizon, now called an attitude indicator, tells the pilot whether he is flying parallel to the Earth, upwards, or downwards.
The indicator on the ill-fated Beechcraft Bonanza was a different type of indicator: an attitude gyro.
According to the accident report, “this is the complete opposite of what is depicted by conventional artificial horizons.”
The report noted that ATCS is responsible for providing pilots with all available information and interpreting data upon request.
“At the time of takeoff in Mason City, the barometer was down, ceilings and visibility were down, light snow was beginning to fall, and the surface and aloft winds were very strong, so we fully expected to encounter severe weather during the flight. “The flight time was estimated to be two hours,” the report continued.
The analysis section of the accident report painted a tragic picture.
“There is evidence that the weather briefing consisted solely of reading the current weather at the en route terminal and the forecast at the destination terminal,” the report said.
“If the correspondent fails to bring these advisories to the pilot’s attention and emphasize their importance, the pilot may underestimate the severity of the weather situation.”
Air traffic controllers and Mr. Dwyer watched the plane take off around 1 a.m.
Dwyer told investigators the plane took off and climbed normally.
After traveling about five miles, the plane’s tail gradually lowered and disappeared.
Air Traffic Authority attempted to radio the pilot, but there was no response.
crash
It wasn’t until 9 a.m. that Dwyer, who was flying overhead looking for the plane, spotted it under four inches of snow.
Parts were scattered over 540 feet of a remote field, with the main wreckage lying against a barbed wire fence.
The pilot was found inside the plane, but the three musicians were unharmed.
Investigators found evidence that the plane was set to cruise and fly at a moderately high speed of 165 to 170 miles per hour.
However, the plane was actually descending perpendicular to the ground at 3,000 feet per minute at the time of impact.
The coroner’s report said the plane skidded and rolled 570 feet before being stopped by a fence.
“The shape of the mass of debris resembled a ball with one wing protruding diagonally from one side,” the coroner’s report said.
The analysis noted that strong winds and turbulence caused the rate of climb and turn instruments to fluctuate, and that “interpretation of the attitude control instruments would have been difficult for an inexperienced pilot like Peterson.”
“He may have become confused and thought he was circling up when he was actually circling down,” the report concluded.
The coroner said parts of each body froze after 10 hours of exposure to around 18 degrees Celsius.
The tour manager had to tentatively identify each body by clothing.
Maria Elena Holly said: Australian Financial ReviewHe learned about it on TV 60 years after the accident.
The shock caused her to miscarry the six-month-old baby she and her husband had. She was absent from her funeral.
She was scheduled to go on tour, but canceled after discovering she was pregnant, the review said.
She said she was afraid of small planes and would never have boarded the plane if she had been with him.
