Peggy Benson wanted to get off the plane. The flight from New York’s Laguardia airport to Miami had already been delayed by hours. Scheduled to take off at 2:45, it was now 6pm.
The city was blanketed in a snowstorm and passengers waited while crew de-iced the plane’s wings. Now she sat on board as snow fell outside and she was upset.“She wanted to get off,” her husband Mason would tell The New York Times the next day, “The stewardess talked her out of it.” They were told that if they left, their bags would continue on to Florida without them. They stayed despite Peggy’s qualms, and the plane taxied down the runway and then took off, climbing into the wintry night.
It was February 1, 1957 and Northeast Airlines Flight 823 would remain airborne for about one minute before plunging from the sky and crashing onto Rikers Island, New York’s 400 acre prison complex.
“All of a sudden,” Peggy said, “Everything was afire. My husband pushed me toward a window.” She hit the ground and started running.
Prisoner Angel Gorbea was playing cards when the plane went down.
“Then,” Gorbea told the Times, “the explosions came. “Then the whole sky, even through the snow, was lighted. We stood at the windows. We saw the people tumbling out of that ship—they were all lighted, too, by the flames. We saw them and their shadows. We saw them stumble.”
Delphine Proelss Lowe was an 11-year-old inhabitant of Rikers at the time of the crash; her father was the island’s Episcopal chaplain.
”My mother and a houseman were preparing dinner when we heard a loud roar, saw a very bright flash and heard my mother scream,” she recalled 50 years after the disaster.
The plane’s left wing had been sheared off, the engine torn away and flames poured forth from the wreckage. It was a scene of chaos. People were on fire and struggled to escape, rolling in the snow as the storm continued around them.
“I was caught on my seat,” said Jacob Taub, a doctor from the Bronx. “Flames licking the back of my neck.”
Twenty people died in the crash, while 81 survivors either fought for their lives or tried to help others, many of whom were terribly burned. Isolated on an island, help would have to arrive by water. With just a…
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