On February 15, 1961, Sabena Flight 548, a Boeing 707, crashed on approach to Brussels’ Zaventem Airport on its way from New York City.
All 72 passengers, as well as one person on the ground, perished in the crash.
Among the dead was the entirety of the United States Figure Skating Team. The tean was on its way to the 1961 World Championships in Prague, Czechoslovakia.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because both prominent and promising U.S. and Russian skaters were on the aircraft and perished in the crash. Athletes, coaches, and parents on the flight belonged to skating clubs across the Northeast, including The Skating Club of Boston, the Washington Figure Skating Club, the Skating Club of Northern Virginia, the Philadelphia Skating Club and Humane Society and the University of Delaware Figure Skating Club. Young up-and-coming athletes who attended the nationals and then stayed behind in Wichita afterward to take part in a training camp for developmental skaters were also on the ill-fated flight.
A contemporary headline in the New York Times edition published on Thursday, February 16, 1961, read: “18 U.S. SKATERS AMONG 73 DEAD IN A JET CRASH” and a second line of the headline read: BELGIAN DISASTER.”
The subheading read: “All Lost When Plane Falls at Brussels—49 [Are] Americans.”
Harry Gilroy’s reporting did not beat around the bush: “A Sabena Airlines Boeing 707 jet crashed near the Brussels Airport early today, killing seventy-three persons, including the eighteen members of the United States figure-skating team.”
“The plane, en route from New York, plunged to earth after it had twice circled the airport. The dead include the 61 passengers, the crew of eleven, and a farmer in the field where it fell.”
As Gilroy noted, the crash was the worst ever suffered by Sabena, the national carrier and flag carrier of Belgium. Sabena’s full name was Societé anonyme belge d’Exploitation de la Navigation aérienne, literally, ”Belgian Corporation for the Exploitation of Aerial Navigation.”
The crash also marked the first time that any passengers had been killed in a Boeing 707 incident.
The aircraft would have landed at once and would not have been forced to circle except that another plane was moving along the runway to take off, an airline official told Gilroy at the time, who then included it in his reportage.
Sabena was based in Brussels and ceased operation under that name after its bankruptcy in 2001. A subsidiary was formed through a takeover of former subsidiary Delta Air Transport and that carrier took over part of Sabena’s assets in February 2002. In 2007, that airline, known as SN Brussels Airlines, merged with Virgin Express to form Brussels Airlines.
Gilroy was. a Times foreign correspondent and cultural news reporter worked at the paper for 21 years and covered Israel in the 1950s. He was at the Times from 1948 through 1969, and he died in 1981.
(Photo: Accura Media Group)
