I'm Going Down!

The blizzard beat with glass-rattling fury on the steamy windows of Franklin Doughty 's comfortable South Minneapolis home. In the living room, Insurance Man Doughty reluctantly left a television basketball game, tramped upstairs to tell ten-year-old Janet and tousled Tommy, 8, to turn off Fibber McGee and Molly and quiet down. It was almost 9 o'clock, said Doughty, and high time for sleep.

At 8:59 p.m., Northwest Airlines' Flight 307-- out of Washington with ten passengers aboard -- was cleared for instrument letdown to Minneapolis' Wold-Chamberlain airport. Pilot Don Jones, 42, and dependable "old man" of the line, hunched forward in his seat, his eyes fixed on the soft-glowing needles of the luminous instruments before him. On such a night their judgment was better than his own; fine-grained snow slanted dazzlingly against the windshield of his twin-engined Martin 2-0-2.

One mile short of the runway's edge the big transport was dragging in over the treetops. There was a rending crunch as the left wing struck a 67-ft. steel flagpole in Fort Snelling National Cemetery. Jones blurted into his radio microphone that he was in trouble. The control tower ordered him to head for the field. Back came the pilot's last words: "I can't! I can't! I'm falling! I'm going down!" The left wing ripped away and spun off into the darkness. Helplessly the crippled plane tumbled toward the soft yellow lights of the West Minnehaha Parkway residential section, plummeted into Frank Doughty's house with a roar and "a flash like a dozen suns," as a neighbor described it. Flames burst from the upstairs windows, and tiny pieces of hot metal rained over the neighborhood.

Downstairs in the house, Doughty and his wife started toward the stairway, but had to retreat from the gasoline-fired flame already roaring through the hall. They turned quickly to follow their older daughter through a living-room window. Moments later, as Doughty tried to raise a ladder to the second story from the backyard, the walls of the house bulged outward and collapsed into a flaming crackling heap. The storm swirled the sparks and oily black smoke into the freezing night, and counted its death toll: Janet and Tommy Doughty killed in their beds, Pilot Jones, his crew of two and all of the ten passengers aboard Flight 307.

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