Remembering American Airlines Flight 191

Twenty-five years after American Airlines Flight 191 crashed in an open field near O’Hare International Airport, a daughter of two of the dead brought rose petals to the land where the plane went down.

For more than two decades, Kim Borchers Jockl hadn’t known where, precisely, the plane had crashed. Her parents, Bill and Corrinne Borchers, were two of the 273 people who died in the disaster on May 25, 1979. 

For years, Jockl remembered, she hadn’t really wanted to look, even though she often drove nearby. “It was like a bad story,” she said. 

Today, the site is slated to become part of the new Interstate 490 tollway, a new chapter that brings its own emotional disquiet for some family members of crash victims. But in the early 2000s it was just a field. 

Jockl and her older siblings, Melody Smith and Jim Borchers, went searching for it as the 25th anniversary of the crash approached.

Jockl had decided that something needed to be done to mark the lives of the victims. The first step was finding the place where it — the deadliest aviation disaster on U.S. soil, excluding the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — happened. 

With the help of the manager of a nearby mobile home park, Jockl and her siblings found the crash site just north of the airport. 

For the anniversary of the crash in 2004, they visited the site with family members of some other crash victims whom they had tracked down. Together the group made a pilgrimage to the crash site. 

Jockl had copied the obituaries of the dead from local newspapers and cut their names from the copies, which she’d run in bright colors. The visitors sprinkled the slips of names in a rainbow on the field. They scooped up spoonfuls of dirt from the ground and placed the soil in baggies. 

Years later, no one told the siblings about the plan to construct a tollway around the crash site, they told the Tribune. The land had been owned for decades by the Chicago Department of Aviation before it was sold to the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority as part of the I-490 project, according to the city agency. The massive construction endeavor is intended in part to facilitate better access to O’Hare, one of the busiest airports in the world. 

“The Illinois Tollway has completed construction of a new, full-access I-90 Interchange and a portion of roadway for the new I-490 Tollway to the north of the crash impact site,” spokesperson Joelle McGinnis said in a statement. 

As part of the new tollway, ramps connecting to Touhy Avenue will be built in the area of the crash site, with construction currently slated to start in 2028, she said. 

Jockl’s sister, Melody Smith, said she heard about the plan on the radio while she was driving to the 40th anniversary memorial ceremony of the crash.   

“We just always assumed — which you should never — that it would just be fenced forever. And there would be just kind of an overgrown field,” Jockl said, “of grave.” 

“And you know what? And life goes on. And all of a sudden, they need more roads, and you need more highways.” 

Jockl feels the ground is sacred. “People were identified by a fingerprint. People were identified by a finger. People were identified by maybe a tooth,” Jockl said. “They were incinerated.” 

In its examination of the 1979 crash, the National Transportation Safety Board found American had taken a maintenance shortcut that deviated from the plane manufacturer’s recommendations. And the NTSB found the Federal Aviation Administration had failed to prevent those improper maintenance procedures. Ultimately, the crash helped spur aviation industry reforms that experts have said make it safer for the rest of us to board planes.

Even though the construction plans bother her, Jockl doesn’t believe in stopping what she describes as progress. But she’d like the toll authority to recognize the history of the land with a placard commemorating the victims of the plane crash. Some other family members and their supporters do, too, and have written to the tollway asking for one. 

“I urge you and whoever else makes this type of decision to make sure that Flight 191 is not forgotten,” Jockl said during the public comment portion of the tollway’s monthly board meeting on Thursday. 

In a statement, McGinnis said the toll authority “will review the request for a memorial marker to honor those impacted with care and sensitivity.”

“We recognize the significance of preserving the memory of those who lost their lives in this tragedy for the public as well as friends and families who continue to be impacted by this event,” she said. 

“There’s a huge scar”

Nearly half a century later, people remember where they were when they heard the plane went down. 

That Friday in May, American Airlines flight attendant Ann Clark-Durkin was looking for a lunch spot on State Street with another member of her crew. They came across a third flight attendant who was wandering around, looking dazed. When Clark-Durkin went up to her, the flight attendant said, “We lost one.”  

“That was all she could say, was ‘We lost one,’” said Clark-Durkin. She meant the DC-10 airplane, which had crashed after only 31 seconds of flight. Back at the hotel, Clark-Durkin learned that most of the 191 flight crew members were based in San Diego, like her. Two of them were her close friends, James DeHart and Nancy Sullivan. 

In Southern California, Kelly Hayward was 13 and came home from school to a note on the door, telling her to go to the home of her mom’s best friend across the street. “She grabbed me and hugged me and pulled me into the bedroom, and said, ‘You know honey, you know, I have some really horrible news to tell you,’” Hayward said. Her cousin’s plane had crashed. Hayward had looked up to 24-year-old Michael Silva like a brother. 

Gary Schwartz was sitting on his sister’s front lawn in Los Angeles, where he was visiting for their grandmother’s 75th birthday. His sister came out the front, holding her pregnant belly, and said the plane had crashed. Their parents, Bernard and Beatrice Schwartz, had died on their way to meet the family in California. 

For the people who loved the 273 people who died in the Flight 191 crash, that horrible day in May 1979 feels fresh. 

“For people it’s 50 years ago,” said Schwartz. “For me it’s yesterday.” 

“There’s a huge scar, and it doesn’t go away. I sort of have made it my friend,” said Schwartz, who was 28 when his parents died. He’s 75 now. 

But family members have had to fight to keep the lives and deaths of their loved ones — so present in their own memories — alive within the memory of the public. 

In interviews with the Tribune, some described feeling, in the years after the crash, as though their grief had been subsumed by the demands of lawyers and insurance agents.

Brian Keeney was 16 when his father Howard Franklin Keeney, on his way home from a business trip, died in the crash. 

After a dispute with a lawyer representing his family in a lawsuit related to the crash, he said, his family never saw some family photographs used in the case again, Keeney said.

“We’re at the bottom here,” Schwartz remembers thinking. “Nobody cares about us. It’s all about their business dealings, the insurance companies, the lawyers, and we’re sitting here — our lives have been completely shattered.”

It wasn’t until 2011 that a permanent memorial to the victims was erected not far from the crash site, the work of a group of plucky Chicago Public Schools sixth graders who were surprised and bothered, upon learning about the disaster, that no such memorial existed in the area. The students attended Decatur Classical School in West Ridge, where Jockl was assistant principal. 

Family members describe that memorial — a garden wall in Lake Park in Des Plaines made of bricks, each bearing the name of a person who died — as beautiful. 

On a chilly May morning this year, Park District workers tended the garden near the memorial. A small plaque planted there reads, “Let us not forget the victims of May 25, 1979, who helped assure the safety of all who have boarded an airliner since that tragic event.” 

Like Jockl, other family members of crash victims said they had no desire to stop the construction of the tollway a couple miles down the road. 

“I’m big on progress,” said Keeney, who as an adult went on to work in airplane maintenance, disassembling and repairing the landing gears of a variety of planes, including DC-10s. He lives in California, like many family members of 191 victims, and has never visited the memorial in Lake Park. 

“There’s no sense in preserving this thing,” said Schwartz, who lives on Chicago’s North Side. “I don’t believe in that at all. You know, I’m not narcissistic in that sense that this revolves around me. No — but have a little respect, have a little compassion.” 

In interviews with the Tribune, experts described the process of memorial building as an uneven one, bound by logistical and political concerns as much as by sentimental ones. 

“It’s those economic values,” said Paul Durica of the Chicago History Museum, “that often take precedence over what I would call our cultural and ethical values, which is what we reflect when we create a memorial.” 

“Sites do not always get to be recognized,” said James E. Young, a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and an expert on memorials. “It’s a bridge, or it’s a highway, or it’s whatever it’s going to be.”

He echoed the feelings of family members who said they didn’t have an interest in stopping the tollway construction.

“To let a commemorative site get in the way of repair and rebuilding is in a way counterlogical, or counterintuitive,” said Young, who suggested the Tollway could consider naming a portion of the new roadway after the victims of Flight 191. “Because you want memory to help repair your loss. And part of that repair might be literal.”

Memorials serve different purposes for different people at different times. The garden wall in the park in Des Plaines serves a practical purpose for the families of Flight 191: It’s a place they can gather together with others who understand their particular grief. 

Jockl sees the purpose of a memorial placard on the tollway differently.

“I don’t think it’s for us. It’s not like I’m going to go there and look at this marker,” she said, sitting on a bench in Lake Park. “It’s for future generations.” 

Family and friends of Flight 191 victims can connect here.