WWII's Worst Civilian Aviation Accident
On 23 August 1944, an American test flight over the village of Freckleton, England, ended in disaster when the B-24 Liberator crashed, claiming the lives of 61 people, including 38 students between the ages of four and six.
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C0RI0LANUS
Joined 2023/01/13Visited 2026/09/08
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"The [Freckleton aviation] disaster was not widely reported on, either in the UK or the US," says Hattie Hearn, the American Air Museum in Britain curator. "The story could have dealt a blow to Anglo-American relations at a time when the American presence in Britain was at its peak."
~snip~
Flashback to an American tragedy 79 years prior (Source: Wiki):
"On 27 April 1865, the steamboat Sultana sank, killing 1,164 passenger in what remains the worst maritime disaster in United States history."
Grossly overloaded with freed POWs and displaced people eager to return home after the US Civil War ended, the faulty boilers of the steamship couldn't sustain the overload and exploded, sinking the Sultana on the Mississippi River just north of Memphis, TN.
Exhausted by the thousands and thousands of deaths and maimed soldiers from the US Civil War, the tragic assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, the recent death of his assassin John Wilkes Booth, the newspapers and the public were tired of national tragedy and misery, so the worst maritime catastrophe in American history was simply put of out of people's minds.
Below, you could see the massive overcrowding on the ill-fated Sultana. No one was ever held accountable for this appalling calamity.
#1 | Posted by C0RI0LANUS at 2026-08-22 05:04 AM | Reply
Thanks, Coriolanus, for the Sultana photo - talk about overloaded!
I asked someone who was an adult in 1918 how the great influenza epidemic became an example for years of a huge yet "overlooked" historical occurrence. His answer, "The war was ending, time to move on."
The first headline is often overwhelmed by the next, e.g. Aldous Huxley's death, otherwise very reportable, swamped by JFK's same-day murder.
#2 | Posted by Doc_Sarvis at 2026-08-22 05:26 AM | Reply
Good Morning Doc Sarvis:
Yup, things get overlooked or forgotten on purpose.
That was the same theory behind Immanuel Velikovsky's immortal Worlds in Collision (1950).
Cosmic disasters shaped the earth, but the unimaginable PTSD it caused forced people to "put it out of their minds," so the catastrophe of a planet heading towards the earth lived on as similar myths found in indigenous people worldwide.
The same "overlooking" phenomenon happens with books, films, sports, and music.
Maestro Franz Schubert lived in Vienna at the same time as Beethoven, but he never got to hear his brilliant symphonies played while he was alive because he was so overshadowed by the Grand Maestro.
The 1960s had terrific heavyweight boxers, but Muhammad Ali overshadowed them.
And Robert Stroud (the Birdman of Alcatraz) died 21 Nov 1963, the same day Richard Nixon was visiting Dallas.
#3 | Posted by C0RI0LANUS at 2026-08-22 06:44 AM | Reply
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