As I was going through some of my old aviation stuff squirreled away , I came across a grim reminder of
a fateful day in NYC aviation history. The day Eastern Airlines flight 66, a 727 fell out of the sky.
She was taken down by wind shear during a thunderstorm just short of Rockaway Blvd and JFK's RWY 22L.
On June 24, 1975 one hundred and thirteen souls perished there. I was a young kid at the time, but I'll never
forget that huge plume of black smoke on the horizon. I could see it clearly from my apartment nearly 5 miles away
in central Queens.
About six years later ('80 or '81), when I was a teen I began making trips by bicycle down to the 22s with my
buds to take pictures of airliners. (We didn't know about the "Mounds" spotting area back then.) We would
just head straight to the approach lights- as close as we could get to the runway. I loved that smell of jet fuel
in the air and feeling a gust of wind in the wake of a jumbo passing low overhead.
One day while waiting for the next arrival I started kicking around some sand out of boredom. I looked down
and saw this twisted little piece of cast aluminum, painted zinc chromate green and lined with rivets. Being
a freshman at Aviation High School I knew right away what I was looking at. But I can still remember feeling a chill
up my back when I realized why it was there. It was an air disaster relic. Something the investigators and clean up crews
missed. A small piece of flight 66. After picking it up, my friends and I started poking around the earth some more.
Within a few minutes we turned up a few more small airplane fragments, only this time they had dark blue and aqua paint.
...The colors of Eastern Airlines.
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