50 Years Later, Historian Pushing to Honor Soldiers Killed in Crash

Summary

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One morning 50 years ago, 22 young men from North Jersey raised their right hands and became U.S. Army soldiers, then hopped aboard a plane at Newark Airport bound for boot camp in South Carolina.

Hours later, they were all dead when Imperial Airlines Flight 201/ 8 crashed and burned after attempting an emergency landing at Byrd Airport near Richmond, Va. The low-budget commercial hop had picked up Army recruits in Pennsylvania and Maryland before it crashed into a swamp, killing 77 of the 79 people aboard. Only the captain and the flight engineer escaped.

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50 Years Later, Historian Pushing to Honor Soldiers Killed in Crash

All told, 74 Army recruits were killed on the night of Nov. 8, 1961 -- 15 of them from Passaic, six from Clifton, and one from Wayne. A federal investigation later blamed the crash on a series of errors by the poorly trained crew, and suggested that lives could have been sav...

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