by Marty Appel
In a little more than an hour, he landed at Akron-Canton Airport in the middle of the night. He got home around three a.m., and then was up at seven to greet the kids. He hadn’t had much sleep, but he was where he wanted to be.
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Cessna Citation cockpit. PHOTO COURTESY CESSNA AIRCRAFT COMPANY
It was eight and a half miles from Thurman’s home to Akron-Canton Airport. The drive took about fifteen minutes, with Ever-hard Road merging onto I-77, and then exit 113 taking you into the midsized airport at Lauby Road.
But first he stopped to see his father-in-law, Tote Dominick, at Prestwick Country Club. The club made for a really pleasant setting on a summer morning, except for running into a member of the media, Gene Dillon, a WHBC radio sportscaster, whom he told that his knees were “fine.” Thurman could even blow off the hometown press when he wanted to.
Tote told Dillon how excited Thurman was about his new plane and what a great family man he was.
As difficult as Thurman’s relationship had been with his own father, that was how easy it had been with Tote. Tote had, like Diana, known Thurman since he was a boy, but now they were adults, friends even. And of course he was in many ways the father that Thurman never had.
Thurman drove to the airport in his Mercedes 450, the one he had gotten from Nat Tarnopol in New York. He was no doubt feeling prosperous with all the trappings: cigar in his mouth, sitting in the 450 Benz, on his way to see his new jet, real estate holdings, second-highest-paid player on the New York Yankees, terrific family…life was good! John Denver (who would die piloting a small plane in 1997) was singing away on his tape player as he pulled into the airport shortly before three. It was a beautiful seventy-six-degree day. He was not planning to fly at all that day, and in fact had a four o’clock meeting with Diana downtown to hear about plans to name a road in his honor. So his stay at the airport would be brief. He just wanted to check out a few things. He didn’t even lock his car. He just wanted to look at his possession one more time.
Naming a road in his honor was not the sort of thing that would have made Thurman rush to be on time. While generally reliable when it came to keeping a schedule—players, after all, are never late for a game—the whole idea of a road in his honor would have embarrassed Thurman.
Celebrity just didn’t fit him well. His friendship with Jerry Anderson, whom he called “Munchkin,” had nothing to do with celebrity. He was a guy his own age that he met at the YMCA and teamed up with to play handball. Just five feet seven and 155 pounds, Anderson was physically more diminutive than Munson, but he had a pilot’s license and growing skills in real estate, two areas that Thurman found interesting. Anderson himself was no great baseball fan, and didn’t seem to be swept away by Thurman’s fame, as Nat Tarnopol and others had been.
There would be no free Mercedes from Anderson. Even free real estate advice used to elicit a joking comment from Jerry about money owed for his time.
Celebrity is about being in the right milieu anyway. A soap star is only a celebrity to those who watch the show. Otherwise, meeting someone who is on Days of Our Lives would hardly cause a non-watcher to break into a sweat. Baseball players feel the trappings of hero worship in their daily lives, but they also meet a lot of people who are unimpressed. Anderson liked Munson for reasons other than his Yankee career.
“What a competitor he was at handball,” he remembers. “If the score was 20-20, you knew Thurman would not lose that twenty-first point. Impossible. He won every time.
“His interest in real estate was always very appealing to me. We spent hours talking about ‘where the market was going’ and which parcels would be in the path of progress. My visits to the Yankee locker room were full of conversations about real estate investing and how to earn a living once his playing days were gone. We seldom talked baseball. Our topics were always (1) real estate and how we would set up partnerships with his contacts, (2) airplanes, and (3) our next handball tournament. Some of the most pleasant days were spent flying over vacant land looking at growth patterns of roads and development. Most of that was done in his Duke or King Air around Canton and its suburbs. As a pilot it was easy for one of us to fly and the other to take notes and make sketches of what one day might be below us.”
At the airport, Thurman bumped into Anderson, and into David Hall, a flight instructor of Anderson’s whom Thurman knew, but who was not otherwise a close friend. Hall, thirty-two, was Munson’s age; Anderson, a year younger.
Anderson, Hall, and Munson walked around the jet, stroking it, patting it, enjoying it as grown men enjoy their new toys. There was the N15NY painted on the tail, a curious selection for a guy who was always talking about getting traded to Cleveland. They peered inside, and perhaps the glance at the control panel reminded Thurman that he had wanted to test a few things, perhaps a check to see if things on the panel were working properly. He had had that curiously difficult flight with Jackson and Nettles a few weeks earlier, and then the flash of flame on the flight with Diane and Billy Martin.
So rather spontaneously, Thurman just said, “Let’s take it up.” And Hall and Anderson nodded at each other with a “Sure, let’s do it” look. It was unplanned, and seemingly forgotten was the four o’clock meeting.
Dave Hall took the copilot seat and Jerry Anderson sat behind him, facing the rear of the plane but keeping his lap belt loose enough so that he could easily turn around to observe. Hall had been Anderson’s instructor, and the priority that gave him the front seat went unspoken. And Anderson had, to that point, never been up in a private jet, despite many hours of experience in single-engine aircraft.
Thurman also put on his lap belt, but not the shoulder harness, which was affixed to the wall. At that point, Thurman had logged 516 hours of flying time, thirty-three of them in the new Citation.
Thurman gave no emergency instructions to his passengers, even though this was their first time in the plane and Anderson’s first time in any private jet. Although the men were friends, it is accepted practice to run through the safety procedures, even when the passengers are seasoned travelers. Without flight attendants aboard, it falls to the pilot to handle it.
Still, Hall and Anderson asked some questions as they looked around. They wanted to know what certain gauges meant on the control panel. They checked to see where and how the handle locked the entrance door, and to see where the emergency door was and that it worked.
The interior of the plane was beautiful. Thurman had selected “Yankee blue” as the interior color, and coupled with the designation of N15NY on the tail, it was hard to believe that he was serious about wanting to be traded to Cleveland anymore. If anything, the plane told the truth about that. The passengers spoke aloud of how taken they were by the beauty of the interior and the plush leather seats.
“Thurman was in a great mood that day,” Anderson told ESPN nearly a quarter of a century later. “He was having a good day. He was in Canton. He didn’t have to rush off to Yankee Stadium that night. He got to spend the night in town. He made a call to the tower and taxied out carefully. And on our way, I think he had his head on square that day.”
There was enough fuel in the tanks, about nine hundred pounds, to travel perhaps eight hundred miles without refueling.
There was not a lot of activity going on in the control tower. N15NY was in fact the only plane in activity mode, as George Ackley, the air traffic controller in the tower, looked down.
“Know who’s flying that N15NY?” asked another controller at his side.
Ackley didn’t know.
“It’s Thurman Munson,” he said.
“Thurman has a Citation? When did he get that?”
“Just last month.”
Ackley was unaware that Thurman was already on his third plane, and had no idea he had moved up to a jet.
“Let’s do a few touch-and-goes,” Thurman said to his passengers. Up to that moment, they had no idea what his flight intentions were. Now it was clear that he was going to stay wit
hin range of the airport, just taking off and landing, then taking off again without stopping, a series of drills that could show off the plane’s power and give everyone a feel for the aircraft, while Thurman checked whatever it was with the control panel that was giving him pause.
Cleared for takeoff, Thurman took the Citation down runway two-three at 3:41 p.m. and lifted the plane uneventfully into a left traffic pattern, the kind favored by pilots and airports because, with the pilot seated on the left, left turns provide greater visibility and feel more natural. A right turn requires a bit more strain to achieve desired visibility.
The Citation achieved an airspeed of about 200 knots and then slowed to below the “gear-down” limit of 174. The plane’s altitude was about 1,300 feet as it headed out about a mile, made another left, and headed back for runway two-three.
“He was trying to give us a sense that day of the smoothness of the aircraft,” said Anderson. “I recall him saying over and over again how smooth the aircraft is and how quiet it is, compared to the King Air.”
The landing after the first loop was fine; Thurman handled it all like a pro, the landing gear was lowered, and the flaps were extended. As is done on touch-and-goes, the plane immediately raised its flaps and took off again from runway two-three.
With the landing gear and flaps retracted now, Thurman pulled the right throttle back to demonstrate the single-engine climb capability. The right throttle was then returned to normal thrust and a left traffic pattern was again flown. The altitude this time was between 2,800 and 3,000 feet.
On this pass Thurman advanced the throttles to demonstrate the acceleration of the jet. Both Hall and Anderson, in interviews with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), recalled that Thurman had used the speed brakes to reduce the airspeed below maximum gear-lowering speed, 174 knots. But he lowered the landing gear, extended the flaps, and retracted the speed brakes, bringing it in for a second normal landing on two-three.
For the third pass, Thurman invited Hall to take control. Seated in the right seat, Hall put his hands on the control yoke and familiarized himself with the responsiveness of the aircraft. At this point, Thurman had Hall fly a zero-flap approach, later called “unbelievable” by an experienced pilot, given that this would be Hall’s first landing in the Citation and the hardest one you can make.
Hall would tell NTSB officials that Thurman did not recommend a final-approach airspeed, but Hall thought that the speed flown was “considerably faster than the reference speed on the airspeed indicator.”
Thurman was handling the throttles and made a few power adjustments. Hall was handling only the control yoke and trim.
This was not an expert landing. The touchdown was long (about midway down the runway), at which point Thurman immediately prepared for a fourth takeoff.
Hall was a bit startled when the aircraft suddenly lifted and began to float in the air about ten feet above the ground. He told the NTSB investigators that he was surprised, until he realized that Thurman had not lowered the flaps to the takeoff position, causing the aircraft to do what is called “ballooning.”
There was no comment from the tower as they surely observed this oddity. It was also considered unprofessional for Thurman to fail to tell Hall that he had not lowered the flaps.
Still, neither of the passengers was alarmed by it; no one aboard seemed to say, “Whoa, what are we doing here?” Professionalism seemed to be in play. They were ready to go again.
This time, due to the arrival of other traffic in the air, the tower told Munson to enter a right pattern on takeoff. This is the more difficult pattern for a pilot because his view of the direction he is headed is not as clear. Still, it was not something that he hadn’t done before.
The right downwind leg was entered at 3,500 feet and 200 knots indicated air speed (KIAS). Munson reduced the throttles to dissipate airspeed and altitude. Hall and Anderson would both recall that the throttles were reduced to a point where the landing gear warning horn sounded. The horn indicated they were going too fast for the landing gear to be extended.
Thurman shut off the horn.
“I knew that when we were at 3,500 feet, those throttles were pretty much all the way back,” Hall told the NTSB.
Seconds before four p.m., the tower controller contacted Munson and told him to extend the downwind leg of his pattern for about one mile. One other plane was landing and another taking off ahead of him. Twenty-two seconds later, the tower told him he could begin his base turn “anytime now.” He would come into runway one-nine over Greenburg Road on the north end of the airport.
Thurman piloted the aircraft into its base leg at once. Neither passenger recalled him using the speed brakes, and both said that he did not lower the landing gear or extend the flaps on downwind.
Flaps are used on wings to slow the aircraft sufficiently to allow it to land. When an aircraft slows too much, the wings don’t develop enough lift to keep it in the air. With the extension of the flaps, or “flaps down,” the surface area of the wing increases to create more lift. At the same time, the flaps create more drag, or friction, on the plane, so they are only used when it is necessary to reduce speed.
The flaps are panels built into the wings at the rear of the wing surface. They can be lowered in varying degrees to adjust for the amount of extra lift required. Anyone who has flown in an airplane has experienced the activation of flaps. In commercial jets, you can hear the noise of the electric motors that lower them and can feel the pitch of the plane change as they are extended. It feels as though brakes are being applied in midair.
Flaps are also used sometimes during takeoff, to allow the plane to become airborne faster. Once in the air, however, the flaps are retraced to allow for faster flight.
Thurman was about to approach the ground with too many things wrong with his basic mechanics. On strike three for the final out of an inning, he knew to roll the ball to the mound for the opposing pitcher to warm up with. It came naturally to him; he knew the game’s subtleties. His piloting skills weren’t as natural.
Mistakes were being made.
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Jerry Anderson was happy to avoid the media for decades. With a common name, and with an eventual move to Florida, he just disappeared from sight. Yes, he had been linked to Munson through the tragedy, but no, it was not something he wanted to relive at all, despite his remarkable good fortune to have survived a plane crash. He’s never been to the grave site and says he’ll never go.
“Thurman was my friend,” he said twenty-eight years after the accident during a long conversation with me. “We sort of lived vicariously through each other. He loved to talk to me about real estate and aviation, and while I would have loved to talk more about the Yankees with him, that was office talk as far as he was concerned, and when we were together, he preferred to leave stories about his ‘day job’ out of the conversation. And that was fine; we had plenty of other things to discuss.”
Anderson has had a fine career in commercial real estate and still pilots a plane. He is the chief operating officer of Sperry Van Ness Commercial Real Estate Advisors, overseeing the firm’s day-to-day operations, including marketing, technology, finance, operations, and human resources. He is coauthor of several audiotape programs on commercial real estate, and one of his books, Success Strategies for Investment Real Estate, is a classic in the field.
He is a frequent guest speaker around the world on real estate investment, and has appeared on NBC, CBS, ABC, and PBS over his career without anyone realizing his connection to the fateful flight.
“It’s so ironic,” he notes, “that I recovered reasonably well in terms of physical signs of the accident. Dave Hall became an air traffic controller. He works in a dark, closed environment. He had the more disfiguring scars on his arms, his face, his hands—the wrinkled skin. I became a public speaker and have few noticeable scars. A little on my right ear and right side of my face, but you have to look carefully. Some on my arms, but I can keep them covere
d. Ironic how that worked out.”
Anderson spoke little of the fateful day to anyone until the twenty-fifth anniversary in 2004, when I had suggested to Willie Weinbaum, a producer at ESPN, that they might try to locate him. They were doing a feature on the anniversary, and Willie had asked me if I could suggest something that hadn’t been done. I told him I didn’t think I’d ever seen an interview with the two passengers.
Willie managed to track down Anderson, who had left Canton in 1982. Jerry agreed to talk for the first time. Three years later, he expanded on it with me.
“Thurman used to talk about the autobiography when it was in progress,” he says. “He was pretty excited about doing it.”
That was news to me, as I hadn’t detected much enthusiasm from him at the time, other than heading off any would-be biographers from doing unauthorized books. But it was nice to hear.
“It’s funny, the things you remember, the things you forget,” he said to me. “For instance, I couldn’t remember that David and I went to different hospitals after the accident.
“I don’t think about it often, but I do if I’m landing on a runway marked one-nine. For a number of years after the accident I would fly into Canton and I always hated when I had to land on one-nine. But my flashbacks aren’t of the accident but of the moments before.
“I also always try to avoid flying on August 2. I’m not a superstitious guy, but I guess on that one, I am. One year I couldn’t avoid it, though; I had to be in Los Angeles for a speech and that was the way it worked out. Well, you won’t believe this, but I’m on the plane, a commercial jet, and I’m sitting there and hear, ‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome aboard. I’m Captain Munson, and I’ll be your pilot today …’”
“No kidding.”
Anderson first learned of Munson when Thurman was a high school star, one year ahead of Jerry. Jerry, a swimmer, would read the local sports section in the Canton Repository, and Munson’s name was always there. Very much in the football stories, a lot in basketball—the “glamour sports,” so to speak. And of course, he was in the baseball stories, but high school baseball didn’t get that much coverage.