Arrow Air Flight 1285
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Arrow Air Flight 1285 was a McDonnell Douglas DC-8 registered N950JW. On December 12, 1985, the aircraft was chartered to carry US servicemen from a six-month stay in the Sinai, where they were overseeing a peacekeeping force, back to Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
Around 6:45 in the morning, Flight 1285 took off from Gander International Airport in Gander, Newfoundland, Canada bound for Kentucky. Shortly after take-off, the aircraft experienced an increase in drag and reduction in lift, which resulted in a stall at low altitude from which recovery was not possible (according to the Canadian Aviation Safety Board). This was due to an ice build up on the wing. The aircraft then crashed to the ground, creating a fire that burned for four hours.
The nine member Safety Board was nearly split on the matter of the probable cause of the accident, with the majority five members supporting the official report concluding that it was due to a failure to adequately remedy ice contamination on the wings before takeoff. However the other four memebers of the board took the all but unheard of step of issuing a dissenting minority report, suggesting that the disaster grew of much more nefarious origins:
- ". . We cannot agree--indeed, we categorically disagree--with the majority findings . . . The evidence shows that the Arrow Air DC-8 suffered an on-board fire and a massive loss of power before it crashed . . . The fire may have been associated with an in-flight detonation from an explosive or incendiary device."
256 people died: 248 US servicemen and 8 crew. That death toll constituted the deadliest plane crash in Canada and the highest death toll on any day for the US armed forces since World War II. However, this was a non-hostile event: the greatest combat loss was after the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut in 1983, which killed 241 US servicemen.
Those servicemen who died were from the following divisions: all but 12 were members of the 3d Battalion, 502d Infantry, and 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault); 11 were from other Forces Command units; and one was a CID agent form the Criminal Investigations Command.
There is a memorial to the 256 victims at the crash site overlooking Gander Lake in Newfoundland.