Shea Stadium,
What an event! No one speaks much about it. I can hardly believe we were there.
Just nine years old, accompanied by dad and big brother, just another ordinary Jet game up until half time.
Wow! What a show. Entertainment for kids. Remote control airplanes buzzing around the stadium, then Snoopy’s dog house,
the red baron flying high.
Then the disaster. We all questioned why they would do it. Why fly a lawnmower? But they did it. Each time it screamed past
our section we felt the chill of fear. After a few laps, Boom, that fear became reality.
The lawnmower went out of control and killed a spectator.
The story is hardly ever heard, but some of us were there. I was able to dig up a couple of articles on the internet so I thought
it would be interesting to share:
1979. Flying Lawn Mower game.
This is something of a mystery that few Jets fans and media remember or even talk
about. Jets and NFL front office have hushed this up over the years. Last Home
regular season for Jets. Jets as per usual have been officially eliminated, but
a win against today's opponent the Patriots will knock out the hated Bostonians
from the playoffs. Result: Jets win the game and knock out the Patriots. But
the real action in this game came at halftime. The halftime show featured an
exhibition of flying remote controlled airplanes. These were large remote
controlled airplanes, and the operators raced them down length of the Field
using it as runway and landing strip. I was in the stands with my father.
Thirteen at the time I was somewhat perplexed that these planes were flying,
diving and zipping around the stands as it appeared to me somewhat dangerous. I
asked my dad, a former Air Force Pilot, if this was dangerous. " Son, I am
sure these are trained professionals, and they would not do this if it was
dangerous to the fans." The finale of the flying exhibition at halftime
was something called the "Flying Lawnmower". This contraption
resembled a regular push lawnmower, which apparently was able to generate so
much power from its blade that it could fly. The Flying Lawnmower to the roar
of the crowd took off and was buzzing the stadium. Ultimately the flying lawn
mower went into a dive, and never pulled up but crashed into the packed stands.
The lawn mower careened into two fans both of whom were from
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Bizarre
Plane Crashes
A segue
for the ages. A look at remote-controlled flying lawnmowers was all good fun
-- a humorously instructive look at the exotic potentials of aerodynamics. I
even cracked a joke that "somebody might get hurt." But never in my
wildest flights of fancy did I expect to hear that somebody had actually been
killed by one of the damn things. True
story. In 1979 at Shea Stadium, in a football game between the New York Jets
and the New England Patriots, the halftime show featured an aerial circus of
remote control airplanes. One of those RC craft was our flying mower. The
mower was the star attraction, zipping the length of the field and buzzing
around the flagpole to the applause of thousands of Jets fans. Until, that
is, the machine went into a dive from which it never recovered, slamming into
the bleachers and striking two people, one of whom later died. David
(last name withheld), who today lives in Colorado, was there and saw it
happen. "The last demonstration was the flying lawnmower," he
remembers. "It was painted red. Until this point in the program, all the
planes had been kept over the field. The mower was much faster than the
others, however, and the pilot brought it back across the crowd. It passed
above my head, then out for a second run toward the flagpole. Over the crowd,
it began to lose altitude, crashing into the stands at about the 50 yard
line. The pilot was standing near me. He was a barber by profession, I
remember hearing." "Jets
and NFL front office have hushed this up over the years," writes Ken
Fratto, on a football page called Jets Insider.com. It's interesting to learn
that conspiracy theories follow not only high-profile crashes of wide body
jetliners, but those of remote control novelty toys. TWA 800, KAL 007...and
the '79 halftime show at Shea. It's
debatable that "crash" is really the appropriate term here. Use of
the word "pilot" seems a similar stretch. And don't bother scouring
the home pages of the FAA or the NTSB for transcripts or conclusions of
"probable cause." No black boxes on the mower. Meanwhile, you
really have to feel for the victim. I'm uncertain where death by remote
control flying lawnmower fits into the hierarchy of ignominious demise, but
it has to be somewhere near the top. More
from another site: Home
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