![]() Immediately after takeoff from Natchitoches Regional Airport, the airplane hit a pecan tree. Elliott, who had to make most of the three-mile trip to the airport on foot because he couldn’t get a cab. The pilot of his chartered Beechcraft E18 was Robert N. Weary of the road, he was eager to get to the next and final stop on the tour in Sherman, Texas. He had achieved chart success with “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and other songs and was working on a third album. Singer/songwriter Jim Croce, 30, was a rising star on September 20, 1973, when he performed his last concert at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. (The opening band for Redding in Madison that night was to be a local outfit called the Grim Reapers, featuring future Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nielsen.) Four months after Redding’s death his single “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” reached the top of the charts. Of the seven passengers, the only survivor was 20-year-old Ben Cauley, one of the musicians. The exact cause of the crash remains undetermined, but the Beechcraft may have been experiencing engine problems. While on the approach to Madison the airplane plunged into Lake Monona. The weather was bad, with cold drizzle and fog. Redding and members of his band, the Bar-Kays, had taken off from the airport in Cleveland for a flight to Madison, Wisconsin, with pilot Richard Fraser. Soul singer Otis Redding, 26, died in the crash of his chartered twin-engine Beechcraft 18 on December 10, 1967. ![]() It took 42 hours to locate the wreckage in a search that included country stars Marty Robbins and Ernest Tubb. The airplane plunged into the ground at high speed. Reeves flew into a violent rainstorm over Brentwood, Tennessee, and apparently became disoriented. His only passenger was his manager, Dean Manuel. Reeves was at the controls of his single-engine Beechcraft 35-B33 Debonair. The singer, known for hits like “Four Walls,” took off from Batesville, Arkansas, on July 31, 1964, for a flight to Nashville. Jim Reeves (1964)Ĭountry singer Jim Reeves, 40, died in a crash similar to Cline’s, except in this case Reeves was flying his own airplane. Patsy Cline was returning home from this Kansas City show when her airplane crashed (HistoryNet Archives). The accident investigators blamed pilot error. Cline, Hughes and musicians Harold Franklin “Hankshaw” Hawkins and Llody Estel “Cowboy” Copas were all killed. After taking off from Dyersburg, Tennessee, into rain, clouds and darkening skies, the airplane crashed to earth in the countryside about 75 miles west of Nashville. Bad weather had been making the trip difficult and forced several stops along the way. The pilot was her manager, Ramsey “Randy” Dorris Hughes. Cline was on her way back to her home in Nashville, Tennessee, after performing in Kansas City, Kansas. Patsy Cline (1963)Ĭountry singer Patsy Cline, 30, and three others died in a crash of a Piper Comanche on March 5, 1963. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper never made it to this concert (HistoryNet Archives). The investigation blamed pilot Peterson, who was not prepared for the weather he encountered on the flight. ![]() Waylon Jennings, then a member of Holly’s band, gave up his seat to Richardson, who was sick. Valens, whose big hit was “La Bamba,” got a seat on the airplane after winning a coin flip with guitarist Tommy Allsup. All aboard, including the 21-year-old pilot, Roger Peterson, died. Shortly after taking off from the airport in Clear Lake, Iowa, on a flight to Fargo, North Dakota, for a show in nearby Moorhead, Minnesota, the single-engine airplane encountered bad weather and crashed in a cornfield. Richardson (“The Big Bopper,” who was 28). Immortalized by Don McLean’s song “American Pie” as “ The Day the Music Died,” the crash of a Beechcraft Bonanza on February 3, 1959, took the lives of 22-year-old Buddy Holly (“Peggy Sue”), Ritchie Valens (17) and J.P. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper (1959) Miller, pilot John Morgan and another passenger, Colonel Norman Baessell, were never seen again. One says a British bomber returning home after bad weather had obscured its target jettisoned its bomb load and accidentally blew the Norseman out of the air another speculated that the Norseman’s wings had iced over, causing the airplane to plunge into the Channel. ![]() The airplane took off from Twinwood Airfield, about 50 miles north of London, en route to Paris, where Major Miller, 40, was going to make arrangements to bring his Army band to the continent to entertain American troops. The popular swing-era bandleader disappeared over the English Channel on December 15, 1944, while a passenger on a single-engine UC-64-A Norseman. Singer Patsy Cline, who was killed in a crash of a Piper Comanche in 1963 (from the Autumn 2022 issue of Aviation History), was neither the first nor the last popular musician to die in an airplane crash. Celebrities Who Died in Plane Crashes, From Glenn Miller to Aaliyah Close
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