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During this peak travel season, we've been giving targets to aim for. For those who take a road trip, this may be a destination for your car. Those with the staycation can travel with us right here. Through our series, Off the Mark, we report on historical markers, like one near the Grand Canyon that marks a historic plane crash. Here's Bree Burkitt from our member station KNAU in Flagstaff, Ariz.
BREE BURKITT, BYLINE: Flagstaff is the final stop each year for millions before they travel the last 80 miles to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. But the city's Citizens Cemetery, just off the famed Route 66, isn't a popular road trip stop. Most don't realize it hides a memorial for what was once the deadliest commercial airline disaster in U.S. history. The monument could easily be missed at the back of the cemetery. Local author Susan Johnson walks past rows and rows of graves and points out a pair of faded black-and-white photos placed on a plaque.
SUSAN JOHNSON: It looks like both of those photos are of stewardesses, two young women who were - or maybe the same young woman, I can't quite tell - who were a stewardess on board.
BURKITT: The patch of grass is no bigger than a swimming pool. It's lined with small obelisks connected by a chain, with a weathered plaque that lists the names of the 66 people buried there.
JOHNSON: But you really wouldn't know that, even, unless you walk up the steps and look down at the bronze and read the plaque, and then you realize, oh, this is a mass burial place.
BURKITT: The monument commemorates the passengers and crew aboard a TWA Constellation when it collided with a United Airlines DC-7 over the Grand Canyon on June 30, 1956. One plummeted straight down in the canyon from 21,000 feet, while the other eventually slammed into a cliff face. No one survived. A thousand miles away, 2-year-old Mike Nelson waited at the airport for his uncle, Jack.
MIKE NELSON: I was there. I was riding on my grandpa's shoulders (laughter), and my mom had my baby sister with her. And we were waiting for my uncle. So we were there when they first announced that the plane was lost and hadn't been heard from for hours.
BURKITT: The planes went down in a remote and rugged area of the canyon. Swiss mountain climbers were recruited to help recover victims' remains and pieces of the wreckage for analysis. Six days after the crash, Nelson's family got the call that his uncle had been identified.
NELSON: Yeah, you can't question it when they find the body that's got the wedding ring with the right inscription inside of it. So it had to be Jack Groshans, my uncle. It said - Jack and Joyce forever - inside it.
BURKITT: They recovered what they could. It took countless trips to fly the remains, wreckage and evidence that was recovered from the crash site 80 miles away to Flagstaff. Ten days later, 66 TWA passengers and crew were buried at the Flagstaff site in a joint service. Another memorial at the Grand Canyon Pioneer Cemetery on the South Rim, a 90-minute drive from Flagstaff, marks the grave of 29 victims from the United flight. At the time, the remains couldn't be identified.
BILL WALDOCK: I personally believe this is probably the most important aircraft accident that we've had.
BURKITT: That's Bill Waldock. He's an aviation safety professor at Arizona's Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, specializing in aircraft crash investigations. The crash underscored the increased stakes of aviation safety as flying became more common. It resulted in numerous new safety regulations, like the consolidation of air traffic control under a single government agency that became the Federal Aviation Administration.
WALDOCK: When you look at the changes that were made in the aftermath of the '56 midair - completely revamped our airspace system.
BURKITT: The crash site in the remote area of the Grand Canyon has been off-limits since the 1950s. It was designated a national historic landmark in 2014. Nelson, whose uncle died in the crash, is nearing 70 now.
NELSON: I needed to know more and more and more. At first, I thought I was just researching what happened to my uncle, but it never went away. I never dithered in that.
BURKITT: His decadeslong search for understanding eventually became a book and a group dedicated to preserving and teaching the history of the crash. Originally, it was made up of the victim's relatives. But now most members have no personal connection - only, as Nelson says, a sincere interest in keeping its legacy alive. For NPR News, I'm Bree Burkitt in Flagstaff.
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