Warning: Some readers may find images in this story disturbing.
It was just after 9 a.m. on Aug. 31, 1988, a sunny Wednesday morning.
Delta Flight 1141 began its takeoff roll down the runway at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, carrying 101 passengers on their way to Salt Lake City.
Everything seemed normal until the wheels of the speeding jet lifted off the cement.
Suddenly, the Boeing 727 began to wobble ferociously from side to side as it strained to gain altitude. Passengers thrashed around their seats as if they were on a roller coaster. The plane smacked the ground and bounced violently back into the air.
“The minute we took off the ground I knew were were going to crash,” Michelle Christensen, a 25-year-old marketing director for a Dallas real estate company, told the Star-Telegram that day. “I was thinking, ‘Oh my God. Oh my God.’”
Jim Hammack was seated in an emergency exit row. “When it turned sideways and bounced two or three times, I broke into a cold sweat. I looked over and saw my business associate flopping around in the seat while the plane was bouncing. I didn’t see flames until the third bounce.”
After 22 seconds of terror, the Delta jet smashed through antennas about 1,000 feet beyond the runway 18L and slid sideways into a field on the south end of the airport, disintegrating the right wing. Erupting flames lapped the rear of the plane. The force of the impact ripped open sections of the fuselage like tissue paper.
For a moment, the cabin was silent. Smoke billowed in.
“I thought, ‘I have to get off the plane,’” Christensen told a reporter. “I made a beeline for the door. My side of the plane was on fire. When I opened the door, the flames started to come in, and everybody screamed, ‘Shut the door!’ which I did immediately.”
She saw passengers open an emergency exit on the opposite side. “We all just jumped off the plane. The field behind us was on fire.”
She was among the 68 passengers who escaped with minor or no injuries that morning. Of the 108 souls on board, 12 passengers and two flight attendants were killed, including one passenger who had escaped but reentered the burning fuselage to help his wife and others.
The crash of Delta Flight 1141 was the last major commercial accident at Dallas-Fort Worth. To some degree, it remains obscured in collective memory by the larger disaster at DFW three years earlier — the 1985 crash of Delta Flight 191, downed by a microburst during approach; 137 people died, including a motorist on Texas 114.
The horrors of that 1985 crash were on the minds of Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporters and photographers who raced to the scene of Delta 1141. By today’s tight security standards, the journalists had extraordinary access to the accident site. Star-Telegram photographers captured rescues from the burning wreckage. Reporters interviewed survivors who escaped. Their reporting filled pages and pages of the newspaper that afternoon and the days that followed.
The National Transportation Safety Board would later determine that the Flight 1141 crew did not properly configure the wing flaps and slats before trying to take off, which prevented the plane from developing sufficient lift. Regulators found that the crew violated rules about non-relevant conversations in the cockpit before takeoff, which can distract from focusing on checklists.
The Star-Telegram shot scores of photos of the crash site. Some of these images published in the newspaper in 1988 but have not been seen since. Others were never published. The UT Arlington Library’s Special Collections, which stores thousands of Star-Telegram negatives, has digitized these photos for the first time.
Warning: Some readers may find images in this story disturbing.
MORE: Check out other historic photos from the Star-Telegram archives here, including:
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