The residents of Fargo-Moorhead had probably not even had their first sip of coffee that Thursday morning, Oct. 30, 1941, when they picked up a special edition of The Fargo Forum the newsboy had dropped at their doorstep.
The giant, all-caps headline shouted “14 KILLED IN FIERY CRASH OF NORTHWEST AIRLINER HERE.”
It was shocking news, of course, made all the more shocking when they realized by the end of the day, with another crash in Ontario that same day, Oct. 30 had become the deadliest day in the history of commercial aviation up to that point.
‘I knew something was the matter’
Northwest Airlines Flight 5 was a regularly scheduled, multiple-stop flight from Chicago to Seattle. It had intermediate stops in Minneapolis, Fargo, Billings and Butte, Mont.; and Spokane, Wash. Its passenger list read like a “who’s who.”
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“Flying in 1941 was still an expensive alternative to rail travel,” said Clay County archivist Mark Peihl. “Flight 5’s 12 passengers reflected this. All but two were business travelers.”
It carried three company presidents, three sales managers, two prominent business owners, an attorney and the state chairman of a political party.
The pilot of the plane was 41-year-old Clarence Bates, who had logged more than 7,000 air hours. He reported no issues with the Douglas DC-3A-269, until Barnesville, when he started to notice some light ice forming on the wings, but he said later, not enough to worry about.
According to reports, the plane was making a routine instrument approach to the Fargo airport around 1:54 a.m. when Bates passed over Hector Field at 600 feet to see if he could break through the clouds.
He circled back over the Red River into Minnesota in preparation for the landing. Later, he said, “this is when the plane started to act peculiarly and I knew something was the matter.”
The airport never heard from the plane again.
With the airport now out of touch, reports of what happened fell upon witnesses who were in the area in those early morning hours. They watched in shock as Flight 5 crashed on the grounds of the Moorhead Rod and Gun Club, one and a half miles north of Moorhead, at 2 a.m.
Reporters interviewed several people who were first on the scene of the crash.
The first was E.M. Gregory, an official with the Great Northern Railroad, who told the harrowing story of finding the dazed pilot, who had been ejected through the windshield upon impact. He had been thrown 250 feet from the plane.
Bloodied and injured, Bates was trying to make it back to the plane to rescue his passengers and the rest of his crew.
Help arrived in the form of Ralph Yoder, an ambulance driver who was called to bring Bates to the hospital. The weather conditions and terrain made it difficult to get the upset and incoherent pilot to the hospital.
‘Everything went haywire’
When Bates had been brought to the hospital, he was unaware that everyone on the plane, except him, had been killed. They broke the news to the devastated pilot the next day.
Considering what he had gone through, his injuries were fairly minor. He had cuts to his head and arm, cracked vertebrae, and damage to his right hand and arm.
Authorities wasted no time talking to him about the crash, questioning him beside his bed at St. John’s Hospital. His account of the night is terrifying — feeling unable to do anything, while the plane he knew so well seemed to be unresponsive to his every move.
Bates was released from the hospital a week later. After the inquiry, Bates was ruled not to be at fault for the crash. His survival proved to be a blessing for authorities working to make air travel safer. Pilots don’t often survive crashes like this one. So his report of the final moments of the flight helped pinpoint what went wrong and how it could be prevented in the future.
The investigators ruled that the cause of the crash was not just the ice buildup on the wings, but the inability of the plane to respond with full power. Also at fault, they said, was the failure of the Northwest dispatcher “to recognize the seriousness of weather conditions in Fargo,” and offer Bates an alternative landing site.
Meteorologist Daryl Ritchison, director of the North Dakota Agricultural Weather Network, said given that it was 1941 and with weather information available at the time, the pilot would have likely been easily caught off guard.
“The temperature dropped from just above freezing to below freezing from midnight to 2 a.m. just before the crash,” Ritchison said, “Also, light fog developed during that time frame, and mist/drizzle was reported just before and during the crash period. All would attribute to icing as the plane was moving into lower altitude.”
Sadly, Bates would not be so lucky next time. Almost a year to the date of the Moorhead crash, on Oct. 31, 1942 (with World War II now underway), Bates was killed when the B-24 bomber he was test-flying crashed in St. Paul.