History in West Lawn

On December 8, 1972, United Airlines Flight 553 crashed into a house at 3722 West 70th Place as it was circling Midway Airport in preparation for a landing.  A total of 43 passengers (including the entire three-man flight crew) were killed, although the three flight attendants and 18 other passengers survived.  Two bystanders on the ground were killed in the wreckage.  The crash quickly became a jackpot for conspiracy theorists.  One of the passengers who perished (in addition to Illinois congressman George W. Collins) was Dorothy Hunt, the wife of soon-to-be convicted Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt.  The crash occurred at the height of the Watergate Affair, and Dorothy Hunt (a CIA operative) had purchased a $250,000 flight insurance policy shortly before the plane took off.  Her purse, recovered from the debris, contained more than $10,000 in cash.

But wait.  There's more!  The flight data recorder mysteriously malfunctioned 14 minutes before the crash.  Charles Colson, who served as Special Counsel to President Nixon, claimed that the CIA sabotaged the plane.  It ended up as one of the most investigated aviation disasters in history, and the National Transportation Safety Board ultimately concluded (in decidedly non-layman's terms) that the “probable cause of [the] accident was the captain’s failure to exercise positive flight management during the execution of a nonprecision approach, which culminated in a critical deterioration of airspeed into the stall regime where level flight could no longer be maintained.”