Lovettsville Air Disaster
The DC-3 had hit the ground with such speed and force that many of the passengers had been cut in two by their safety belts.
Jerome Lederer, director of the Civil Aeronautics Board’s safety bureau, was at the scene of the crash within hours.
The director reported that the aircraft had “struck the ground at a sharp angle on its nose and ricocheted about 100 feet, breaking up as it turned over.”
Throughout the long night, the ghastly job of removing the victims from the wreckage went on. A caravan of ambulances and hearses carried the dead to nearby Leesburg, where a cemetery chapel had been converted into a temporary morgue.
The Lovettsville Air Disaster occurred on August 31, 1940 near Lovettsville, Virginia. Pennsylvania Central Airlines Trip 19 was a new Douglas DC-3A that was flying through an intense thunderstorm at {{convert|6000|ft|m}}. Numerous witnesses reported seeing a large flash of lightning shortly before it nosed over and plunged to earth in an alfalfa field. With limited accident investigation tools at the time, it was at first believed that the most likely cause was the plane flying into windshear, but the Civil Aeronautics Board report concluded that the probable cause was a lightning strike.
The aircraft was flying through a thunderstorm in turbulence when the it nosed over and plunged to earth near Short Hill Mountain. Disabling of the pilots by a severe lightning discharge in the immediate neighborhood of the airplane, with resulting loss of control. With limited accident investigation tools at the time, the most likely cause was the plane flying into windshear. U.S. Senator Ernest Lundeen from Minnesota killed.
In a thunderstorm which delayed it for nearly half an hour at Washington's airport, a Douglas DC-3 of Pennsylvania Central Airlines took off one night last week for Pittsburgh. Twenty-three minutes later, over the foothills of the Blue Ridge range near Lovettsville, Va., 36 miles west of Washington, something happened. Farmers attracted by a crash found the plane strewn over a clearing into which it had apparently plunged full tilt. Killed and mangled were all 21 passengers, its crew of four. The force of the crash was so great that, strapped in their seats, many of them were literally cut in two by their safety belts.
