In 1931, a deadly air crash in Kansas inspired safer flights. Why have some forgotten that lesson?

A Fokker tri-motor airplane as flown by the Army Air Corps in 1927. A similar model, the civilian Fokker F-10, went down in March 1931 in the Flint Hills of Kansas, killing eight people, including football legend Knute Rockne. (Library of Congress)

The sky was nearly touching the ground.

As I drove across Interstate 35 in the Flint Hills recently and watched the low clouds cast galleon-like shadows on the dry grass and rocks below, I thought of a plane crash that happened here 95 years ago this month. The reaction to that tragedy, in the early days of commercial aviation, set the tone for a century of accountability and transparency in air safety that followed.

Federal lawmakers should be reminded of that lesson. On Feb. 24, the U.S. House rejected an aviation safety bill — the ROTOR Act — that would enhance aircraft identification. The bipartisan legislation was in response to the Jan. 29, 2025, collision of a commercial jet and a military helicopter over the Potomac River near Washington, D.C. The jet, Flight 5342, was inbound from Wichita.

The collision killed 67.

The ROTOR Act passed the Senate in December, but the legislation failed to clear the House, 264-133. Because a two-thirds majority was required, the act failed by a single vote.

The only member of the Kansas delegation to vote against it was Rep. Tracey Mann, a Salina Republican.

We’ll return to the ROTOR Act, but first let’s talk about that accident nearly a century ago. If you’re a Kansan or a football fan, you’ve probably heard of it, but you might not realize how important the crash was in influencing industry standards and government regulations. It was the equivalent of the sinking of the Titanic in terms of making headlines and transportation safety policy.

It was the morning of Tuesday, March 31, 1931, and winter was slow in leaving east-central Kansas. Low clouds scudded over the Flint Hills, making the pilot of the tri-motor aircraft peer in desperation through the damp windscreen for clues to his position.

In addition to the fog, there were snow drizzles, ice and mist. The pilot’s name was Robert Fry, a veteran World War I flier, and he was struggling to keep the Fokker F-10A on course. His co-pilot, Jess Mathias, worked the radio, repeatedly asking the Wichita airport for weather updates.

“The weather here is getting tough,” Mathias told Wichita. “We’re going to turn around and go back to Kansas City.”

Transcontinental and Western Airlines (now TWA) Flight No. 5 had left the municipal airport in Kansas City some 90 minutes earlier, on a mail-and-passenger run to Wichita and on to Los Angeles, with several stops on the way. The flight was about half full, with six passengers in the cabin below and behind the pilots.

The Fokker “Super Tri-Motor,” tail number NC999E, was one of three dozen operating in the United States. The American-built planes were distinguished by their Pratt & Whitney Wasp engines, the fixed landing gear, and their high-wing design. That wing was made of wood laminate, as were other structural parts of the aircraft.

Flight 5 was badly off course, but Fry may have attempted to descend below the clouds to use a railway across the Flint Hills as a guide. When Wichita attempted to raise them on the radio, Mathias said they were too busy to talk.

Nobody really knows what happened next, but those on the ground reported hearing engines droning above, then sounds that could be explosions or backfires. Some saw the plane emerge nose-down from the clouds, one wing detached, and slam into the ground. The motors buried themselves in the cold earth, the propellors still grinding, and the rest of the craft shattered into thousands of pieces. The broken wing landed perhaps a quarter of a mile away, and the ground between it and remains of the fuselage was scattered with mail bags.

Thirteen-year-old Easter Heathman and his father, a local farmer, were among the first on the scene.

“The tail was sticking straight out of the ground,” Heathman recalled in the fullness of his years, in 1996, for the South Bend Tribune. “There were five bodies that had been thrown 20 to 25 feet west of the plane. Three bodies were still in the wreckage.”

During an inquest into the accident, held two days later in a courtroom at Cottonwood Falls, about 20 miles away, the dead passengers were identified (from the papers they carried) as follows:

John Happer, an executive at the Wilson sporting goods company in Chicago; Spencer Goldthwaite, an advertising man from New York; W.B. Miller, a life insurance executive from Hartford, Connecticut; H.J. Christen, an interior decorator from Chicago; Charles A. Robrecht, head of a wholesale produce company in Wheeling, West Virginia; and Knute Rockne.

Rockne, the legendary Notre Dame football coach, dominated headlines then and still gets top billing in most accounts today. But there is a certain democracy in the kingdom of death, and all of those on Flight 5 should be remembered as equals.

There was no Federal Aviation Administration in 1931, but there was a Civil Aeronautics Bureau under the Department of Commerce, and all Fokker F-10s were grounded following the accident. At the time, the CAB was under intense pressure from the press to release details about the crash, but the bureau had a rule about not sharing accident information publicly. The CAB soon yielded and made its findings public. By 1934, transparency in crash investigations became law. Today, you can search the FAA’s crash and incident database here.

The Commerce Department initially blamed the crash on a broken blade on the right engine because of ice that had formed on the propellor hub. A few days later, it retracted that statement because the propellor and hub were dug out of the crash site, intact. The cause was then attributed to ice that made the pilot’s instruments inoperable while flying in clouds.

There probably wasn’t just one cause for the crash. Moisture had likely accumulated in the Fokker’s wooden wing, weakening the glue joints and causing failure under stress. Years later, a mechanic recalled that panels on the plane’s wing were loose, and that he had protested the plane was unsafe. The ailerons, the hinged flight control surfaces on the trailing edge of the wings, could also have been prone to flutter, causing loss of control. The pilots may have become disoriented, unable to rely on their instruments, and were betrayed by the rotten wing while attempting to return to level flight.

It was clear to aircraft manufacturers that new, safer planes were needed. TWA put out a call to manufacturers for an all-metal passenger airplane, and Douglas Aircraft proposed a twin-engine model that became the DC-2. It also featured retractable landing gears, more powerful engines and a low tapered wing. The DC-3 that followed was a larger and improved version and saw extensive military use during World War II and civilian use beyond.

More than 150 are still flying, according to Forbes.

The Rockne crash, with the CAB attempting to investigate using eyewitness statements and the pieces of the plane on the ground, became standard for later crash investigations. Congress soon gave aviation regulators the authority to subpoena witnesses and make findings public. In 1958, the Federal Aviation Agency was created as an independent entity.

The aviation industry also responded to the Kansas crash by moving away from high wings and wooden construction.

In decades to come, Heathman, the boy who may have been first on the scene, gave tours of the crash site, where a 10-foot granite obelisk had been erected. He didn’t charge for the tours, just loaded the curious and the respectful into his pickup truck to go up the hill, which was, and is still, on private land.

I never got to take one of Heathman’s tours — he died in 2008 — but I did talk once to David Croy in Cottonwood Falls, whose father had cared for Rockne’s body before it was placed on a train back to Indiana. His father had put the body temporarily in a wicker coffin, and Croy described a coffin similar to it — or perhaps the coffin — he had in a garage.

There’s a Rockne memorial on Interstate 35 at the Matfield Green Service Area, a few miles from the crash site. The exhibit once featured a wickedly bent propeller blade from the Fokker 10, but it was removed when the memorial was updated in 2019. The prop and other pieces from the crash can now be seen at the Chase County Historical Museum.

Fast forward now to the Kansas Day 2025 crash of Flight 5342.

At 8:48 p.m. a Sikorsky UH-60L Black Hawk Army helicopter collided with a Bombardier CL-600-2C10 operated by PSA Airlines half a mile southeast of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, according to the National Transportation Safety Board report. Both aircraft fell into the Potomac River. Two pilots, two flight attendants, and 60 passengers aboard the plane and the three helicopter crew members were killed. Some of the passengers were Kansas residents or youth ice skaters concluding a training camp in Wichita after the U.S. Figure Skating Championships.

The NTSB identified multiple causes for the accident, including poor air traffic awareness and the limitations of collision averting systems on both aircraft.

It also made 50 recommendations to avoid such crashes in the future.

The ROTOR Act, among other measures, would have required all aircraft to be equipped with enhanced location technology, as recommended. It would also have closed an FAA loophole that allows military Black Hawk helicopters to fly without enhanced identification technology on training missions. This would have given the crew of the Black Hawk involved in the Potomac crash minutes to take evasive action instead of seconds.

But the legislation died in the House after the Pentagon pulled its support for the act a day before the vote.

“As currently drafted,” the Department of Defense said in a statement, “enactment would create significant unresolved budgetary burdens and operational security risks affecting national defense activities.”

In other words, the Pentagon is protecting its ability to operate helicopters and other aircraft in secret, without the safety technology recommended by the NTSB. The language about “national defense activities” is boilerplate for “we do what we want.”

The Pentagon’s opposition to the ROTOR Act, at the last possible moment, is a slap in the face to the families of the Flight 5342 victims. Mann, the Kansas representative whose vote literally doomed the bipartisan legislation, should be ashamed of himself.

The ROTOR Act was an increasingly rare example of commonsense legislation that would have taken a tragedy and made us all safer because of the lessons learned. The bill was at the finish line. Instead, it was scuttled by a single vote in the House.

It is unlikely the GOP-controlled House will revive the legislation.

The moment has passed, and more lives will be lost.

Mann — and the 132 other House members who voted against the act — are to blame. But mostly Mann, because he’s from the state where the flight originated, and Kansans were on board — on Kansas Day. Lizzie Fletcher of Texas was the lone House Democrat to vote “no.”

It is unsurprising that Mann’s office did not respond to a request for comment for a Feb. 25 Kansas Reflector story. Anybody who would fall into line with the Pentagon’s increasingly power-mad and secretive posturing surely doesn’t give a damn about what the public thinks.

Or how families of the 67 killed last year feel.

They were parents and spouses and children, passengers and airline employees and service members, and all were loved by someone. Death comes for us all eventually, but the death that came for them was unexpected — and unnecessary. The refusal of Mann and his House colleagues to pass an act designed to prevent future calamity compounds the tragedy of Flight 5342.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.