Virginia

Boundary Stones: WETA's Washington DC History Blog

Death Over the Potomac

8/17/2021 in DC by Ben Miller

Ralph and Mildred Miller just wanted to get home. After an autumn trip to Europe in 1949, the Chevy Chase couple had dealt with 24-hours of delays as bad weather blocked their return to Maryland. But skies were clear on the morning of November 1. The Millers boarded Eastern Airlines Flight 537 from New York and flew south uneventfully. But as they prepared to land at National Airport, their DC-4 airliner suddenly lurched left. The husband and wife felt a tremendous crash. Then they felt nothing at all.

Over the next three days, the bodies of Ralph, Mildred, and 53 other people were recovered from the frosty waters of the Potomac River. Morgues in D.C. and Alexandria struggled to process their soaked and mutilated remains. In the 40-year history of American aviation, no airplane crash had ever claimed so many lives.

The immediate cause of the crash was no mystery. From their perch at National Airport, air traffic controllers had watched with horror as a P-38 fighter plane, surplus from World War II, descended on Flight 537 and crashed square into its fuselage. The controllers had yelled desperate orders for the P-38 to turn, but it never did. Investigators needed to know why.

There was little out of the ordinary about Flight 537, but the plane it struck was hardly a fixture of the D.C. skies. Piloting the P-38 was Captain Erick Rios Bridoux, Bolivia’s director of civil aviation. Only 29, Rios spoke perfect English and was already considered his country’s best aviator. He came north to inspect the P-38, which Bolivia planned to purchase, and take it on a test flight. On November 1, he looped casually around Northern Virginia before preparing to land at National. The tower told him to circle once, wait for another plan to land, and then do the same. Everything that followed became a subject of debate and litigation.

From the ground, motorists on the George Washington Parkway (then called the Mount Vernon Memorial Highway) heard a massive explosion above them. Within seconds, debris began landing all over the road and the Potomac. J. Donald Mayor jammed on his brakes. To him, it looked like pieces of paper were fluttering from the sky, but they were really shards of metal. He immediately pulled over and ran to the shoreline, where a 50-foot section of the plane was jammed into the mud. Six twisted legs stuck out from the ground. “There was no noise, no groans, or shouts,” he told reporters.

PEPCO workers on a lunch break got an even clearer and gorier view. Glancing up at the sky, C.W. Simpson saw Flight 537 go down, looking like “an acetylene torch had just cut the big plane right in half.” He and his co-workers ran into the water to look for survivors. Most of the bodies they encountered were already dead, but a few clung briefly to life, moaning in pain.

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This map depicting both planes' flight patterns was included in the CAB report on the crash. [Source: Department of Transportation.]

{Snip the rest, including many, many links to news accounts in the Evening Star.}