40 years later, United Airlines collision with fighter jet still remembered

Tuesday, April 21, 1998 | 12:02 p.m.

Not long into the flight, a fighter jet from Nellis Air Force Base collided with the plane just outside of Las Vegas, killing all 47 people aboard and the two pilots of the Air Force jet.

The worst airline disaster in Las Vegas history occurred on a bright, clear morning April 21, 1958, when a F100F fighter jet collided with the plane in midair at 21,000 feet, sending both plummeting to the earth.

The impact was visible from Las Vegas, about 15 miles to the northeast. Witnesses described a rain of metal gleaming off the early morning sun, the passenger plane a spinning ball of fire that exploded intermittently as it spiraled toward the ground.

A few miles south, the jet fighter slammed into the earth. The collision occurred not far from where actress Carole Lombard had died in a fiery crash 16 years earlier.

"It was just a tragedy. I don't really know how to describe it," said Joe Digles, 67, a reporter sent to the site. "You just knew no one was going to be alive."

The high altitude and the heavy winds caused the wreckage to be scattered over a wide area. Some of where the debris was scattered is now being encroached upon by development, but not enough to keep Las Vegas resident Doug Scroggins from making several treks to look for artifacts.

Scroggins, an aviation accident historian and researcher, has found dishware, souvenir pilots' wings given to children who boarded the United flight, aluminum fragments and other miscellaneous items that went unrecovered at the scene by accident investigators.

"From an archaeological standpoint, the site is in very poor condition," said Scroggins, president of Lost Birds, a Las Vegas-based organization that researches airline disasters. "There's now a road going through where the nose of the cockpit was."

Scroggins has been to the area some 40 times searching for remnants. As development moves into the area, he is trying to generate interest in a memorial to the 42 passengers, five United crew members and two Air Force pilots who died.

The collision occurred at exactly 8:30 a.m. UAL flight 736 was en route from Los Angeles to New York when the Nellis jet made contact with the right wing, slicing off a 15-foot section.

Digles, a 28-year-old reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal at the time, was able to get to the scene unrestricted by rescue personnel. There, he counted 15 bodies, noting the personal items strewn about - a stewardess' kit, a deck of cards. The engines of the DC-7 tore up the desert about a mile east of where the fuselage lay.

Equally morbid as the crash site, Digles said, was the fact that curious tourists were driving their sedans through the rugged terrain off U.S. Highway 91, which later became the Las Vegas Strip, to get a closer look. Some had witnessed the collision, he said. Others "were inspired to gawk" by bulletins on the radio.

Cate Wilman, a historian with Nellis Air Force Base, said that collision, along with a couple of other air mishaps, changed the way air space was allocated in the Las Vegas Valley.

Nellis does not have extensive records on the collision, but an investigation by the Civil Aeronautics Board, Scroggins said, found the cause to be "human and cockpit limitations" and the failure of that agency and Nellis to reduce collision exposure. Simply put, Scroggins said, rules regarding air space were a lot looser than they are today.

Executives with two other commercial airliners charged a few days afterward that Nellis jet fighters were endangering their safety by "stunting" in civilian air corridors over Las Vegas the same day as the collision. Nellis denied the allegations.

Memorials have been set up for other fateful flights, including a ceremony last year for the 50th anniversary for a United flight that crashed in Bryce Canyon, Utah, killing 52. Scroggins figures relatives of the April 21, 1958, air disaster deserve something similar.