November 14, 1970: Southern Airways Flight 932 struck a hillside one mile short of the runway at Tri-State. All 75 aboard died, including 37 Marshall football players. Every November 14 at noon, the fountain on Marshall's campus goes silent until spring.
A Pirep featured story · KHTS Tri-State/Milton J. Ferguson Field, Huntington, WV
On a rainy Saturday in November 1970, the Marshall University football team flew to Greenville, North Carolina and lost to East Carolina 17-14. That evening the team boarded a chartered Southern Airways DC-9 at Kinston for the flight home to Huntington, West Virginia. Seventy-five people were aboard: 37 players, the coaches and athletic staff, the crew, and a planeload of the program's people, among them a city councilman, a state legislator, and four physicians.
At 7:34 p.m., Captain Frank Abbott's crew reported the outer marker inbound on the localizer approach to runway 11, today's runway 12. The weather was a ragged ceiling and five miles in light rain, fog, and smoke. The approach had no glideslope; the procedure bottomed at a minimum descent altitude of 1,240 feet MSL, 412 feet above the field. The DC-9 descended through the MDA about two miles out and kept going, roughly 300 feet lower, with neither pilot reporting the runway or its lights in sight. On the cockpit voice recorder, the pilots can be heard discussing whether the autopilot had captured a glideslope; the approach did not have one.
At about 7:36 p.m. the aircraft struck treetops on a hillside 5,543 feet short of the threshold, one mile out, and came to rest 4,219 feet from the runway, inverted, in a hollow. The NTSB called the accident unsurvivable. All 75 aboard died. The remains of six of the players were never identified; they are buried together at Spring Hill Cemetery, on a hill overlooking the campus.
The investigation found no mechanical failure and no controller error. The probable cause was the descent below minimums without visual contact with the runway environment; as to why an experienced crew continued below the MDA, the Board could name only two likely explanations, misread cockpit instruments or an altimetry system error, and could not prove either. The answer was never satisfying.
The crash took nearly the whole varsity, head coach Rick Tolley, and a cross-section of Huntington itself; seventy children lost at least one parent, and eighteen lost both. Marshall considered ending football. Instead, on St. Patrick's Day 1971, it introduced Jack Lengyel, hired away from the College of Wooster, who rebuilt the roster from the nine veterans who had not been on the plane, freshmen playing under a special NCAA waiver, walk-ons, and athletes borrowed from other sports. The 1971 Young Thundering Herd won two games; the first, over Xavier, came on the last play of the first home game after the crash. The 2006 film We Are Marshall tells that part of the story.
The Memorial Fountain outside the student center, a 13-foot bronze by sculptor Harry Bertoia, was dedicated in November 1972; Bertoia meant it to commemorate the living rather than the dead. Every November 14 the university holds its memorial service at the fountain at noon, lays a wreath, and turns the water off; it stays silent through the winter and runs again in spring.
The hill is still there, a mile short of the runway 12 threshold.