The plane reached the airport three hours late, and the University of Evansville basketball team boarded. Less than two minutes later, the flight was over, and 29 people were dead. As the anniversary of that tragic night approaches, we look back
30 Years After 90 Seconds
Though 30 years have passed, many Evansvillians remember what they were doing on the night of Dec. 13, 1977, when they heard about the plane crash that killed the hometown basketball team. Wallace Graves was enjoying a performance at Wheeler Concert Hall; Patrick Wathen was sitting down to supper; John Althoff was watching television. The quotidian quiet of that Tuesday night was shattered throughout the city as the details of the terrible accident trickled into living rooms, delivered by frantic phone calls and somber newscasts. It was clear by midnight that the Evansville community was in the midst of a great tragedy.
Just as many Americans vividly remember the crisp, late summer day and the sky’s precise hue – a perfect cerulean blue – as two planes flew into the World Trade Center towers on the occasion of our nation’s greatest tragedy, many Evansvillians also remember the weather when the charter plane carrying 29 people, including 14 members of the University of Evansville basketball team, crashed shortly after take-off. It was cold, rainy and foggy – an altogether dreadful night.
Among the dead were Coach Robert “Bobby” Watson; UE Athletic Business Manager Bob Hudson; UE Comptroller Charles Shike; Sports Information Director Gregory Knipping; popular radio announcer Marvin “Marv” Bates; and UE fans Maurice “Maury” King, the 33-year-old owner of Moutoux Furniture, and Charles Goad, 61, who owned Goad Equipment Co. The crash also claimed the lives of young men filled with promise and talent: seniors Kevin Kingston, John Ed Washington, and Marion Anthony “Tony” Winburn; juniors Stephen Miller and Bryan Taylor; sophomore Keith Moon; freshmen Warren Alston, Ray Comandella, Mike Duff, Kraig Heckendorn, Michael Joyner, Barney Lewis, Greg Smith, Mark Siegel; and the team’s three student managers, Jeff Bohnert, Mark “Tank” Kirkpatrick and Mark Kniese.
This band of young men was part of a pivotal moment in UE’s basketball program. Many of them had arrived in the shadow of the legendary Arad McCutchan, a beloved coach who’d guided the Purple Aces to 515 victories in his 31 years at UE, winning 40 of 50 postseason games, 14 Indiana Collegiate Conference titles, and five NCAA College Division championships. Nationally known and respected, McCutchan had coached two Olympic Trials teams and was twice named NCAA College Division Coach of the Year.
Beyond his coaching success was McCutchan’s engaging personality. Known as “Coach Mac,” the Columbia University- educated math professor brought a sense of fun to the game. He clad his players in boxing robes rather than warm-ups, outfitted them in T-shirt style jerseys, and instructed them to wear orange uniforms at away games. It worked. As Time magazine later recalled, McCutchan made the Purple Aces “the pride and passion” of Evansville. “Season tickets to the best seats,” Time noted, “were so hard to come by that die-hard fans fought over them in divorce settlements.”
In the heady days between 1959 and 1971, UE men’s basketball won its five national college championships, but by 1977 the program had lost some steam. Season ticket sales had dropped and just as the team was moving up into the NCAA’s prestigious Division I, McCutchan retired, at the age of 65.
University officials chose Bobby Watson, a charismatic, hard-charging coach who’d run up a string of victories as an assistant coach at Oral Roberts University, to follow in McCutchan’s wake. Watson understood almost immediately what UE basketball meant to the community, recruiting some hot-shooting freshmen, reviving the old Purple Ace riverboat gambler as the team mascot, and launching his own public relations campaign with Rotarians, Kiwanis Clubs, and community leaders to keep the rabid McCutchan fans on board and to win new ones. In the weeks after he was hired, 1,000 new season tickets were sold.
In spite of a bumpy start of three losses to one win, team spirits were high on the evening when Watson and his players boarded the chartered DC-3 airplane bound for Nashville and a game against Middle Tennessee State University the following day. They spent three hours waiting at the airport for the plane to arrive. The plane, owned by the Indianapolis-based National Jet Service, had been delayed by nasty weather.
Jim Stewart, president of National Jet Service, and Bill Hartford, the company’s general manager were already on board. Their charter service, just a year old, had flown 750,000 passenger miles without an accident and counted the state’s biggest universities among their clients.
In the pilot’s seat for Air Indiana 216 was Ty Van Pham, hired by National Jet Service just two months earlier. He was among the thousands of refugees who fled Vietnam after the U.S. military’s pull-out ended the war and had been the personal pilot of South Vietnam’s prime minister. Pham had logged 9,100 hours of flight time when he joined the charter company. His co-pilot, Gaston Ruiz, a 35-year-old refugee from Cuba who moved to the United States in 1963, had logged more than 1,000 flight hours. Flight attendant Pamela Smith was only 24 and relatively new to the job with only 15 hours in the air.
Investigation reports would later show that after the aircraft landed and parked, both engines were shut down. The team’s baggage was loaded, and the passengers boarded. The plane’s engines started with no difficulties, and at 7:19 p.m., Air Indiana 216 was cleared into position on runway 18, where the pilots waited for a large plane to depart from an intersecting runway. Before clearing the Aces’ plane for take-off, a local controller warned Pham and Ruiz about wake turbulence, a kind of mini, horizontal tornado created in the air by a departing plane. Within seconds after liftoff, the pilots must have known something was wrong, because one of them instructed the tower, “Standby.” It was the last known transmission from the flight.
University of Evansville President Wallace Graves was attending a string quartet concert on campus with his wife Barbara when Thornton Patberg, vice president of student affairs, retrieved him from the audience and told him unconfirmed reports said the plane carrying the basketball team had crashed at the airport. Graves collected Barbara, who returned to their on-campus home while her husband met with Patberg and members of the athletic department before receiving an escort to police headquarters. “I was waiting for further orders,” Graves says, “and it seemed as though it never came to fruition.” Meanwhile, at the Graves home the telephone rang non-stop. Barbara fielded calls from frantic parents and worried friends, who heard unconfirmed reports that the UE plane had crashed at the airport. She had little information to offer. “We were under pains not to tell anybody exactly what was happening until the police verified everything,” Wallace Graves recalls.
Patrick Wathen, a 26-year-old reporter for The Evansville Courier, was working the police beat that night. He was home for dinner and had just sat down to eat when the phone rang. It was the newspaper’s city editor, calling to say a plane had crashed into Melody Hills, a subdivision southeast of the airport. Wathen had grown up on the corner of Dusseldorf and Hamilton Drives in the heart of Melody Hills, and his first thoughts were of his parents. “I tried to call,” he says, “and there was a dead line. Of course my mind’s flashing to the worst possibility.” He jumped in his car and raced from his home in Armstrong Township, northwest of Evansville, to his old neighborhood.
John Althoff, a 31-year-old police officer and crime scene technician, was at home on the evening of the tragedy, watching television. At about 7:30 p.m. a WFIE-TV 14 news anchor announced there had been a crash at the Evansville airport involving a large airplane. Though off-duty, Althoff rushed to the scene.
Ninety seconds after takeoff, Air Indiana 216 crashed into the muddy ground at the edge of airport property. The force of the impact sliced off the heels of co-pilot Ruiz’s shoes, which were on the control pedals of the aircraft. After the plane’s initial impact, the wings were ripped off, the propellers torn from the engines, and most of the passengers were ejected, many still strapped in their seats, into the cold night. The plane exploded and came to rest at the edge of a ravine, having traveled approximately 8,700 feet from takeoff on runway 18.
Witnesses later reported seeing the lights of the plane as it turned sharply toward Melody Hills. Some speculated the pilot may have realized there was a problem and was trying to return to the runway. They also reported an explosive noise like a shotgun blast. Investigators believed the engines lost some power, causing the pilots to increase throttle. The plane assumed an extreme nose-high, tail-low position, climbing into the clouds and disappearing for an instant before reappearing a moment later, headed toward the ground.
UE Athletic Director Jim Byers had originally planned to travel with the team but stayed behind to interview a candidate for a baseball coaching position. While he worked in his office on campus, the charter plane carrying the team clipped some trees near his home in Melody Hills. Air Indiana 216 struck branches 52 feet above the ground, tearing off the landing and strobe lights. Witnesses said the plane dipped wildly from side to side, and one resident reported a strange engine noise for nearly 15 seconds and then heard nothing. “It was as if the engines were turned off like a radio. Complete silence,” the resident told investigators. “I heard no crash or explosion.”
The first rescuers on the scene were Melody Hills residents who fought the rain and the mud, slogging down a steep, wooded embankment just northeast of where Ward Road dead ends. The railroad track below cuts through a ravine separating the neighborhood from airport property, and some of the victims had been flung into the pass. Some neighborhood residents administered first aid to victims, four of whom were still breathing, while others climbed the 20-foot bank on the other side of the ravine to reach the accident site itself. Investigators later estimated residents arrived more than 10 minutes after the plane crashed...
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