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Many sing about “the day the music died” on February 3, 1959, when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and JP “The Big Bopper” Richardson died in a plane crash.
Don McLean coined the term in his 1971 hit “American Pie.”
The song about the decline of the ’60s begins with the death of the three young musicians, “the end of the happy ’50s,” he said. Forbes Magazine.
Investigators point to rapidly changing winter weather conditions that were not communicated to the inexperienced pilot as the cause of the accident that left such a tragic mark on music history.
“It is believed that shortly after takeoff, pilot Peterson entered an area of complete darkness and in which there was no defined horizon; “The snow conditions and the lack of horizon (visual terrain) forced him to depend solely on the flight instruments for the attitude and orientation of the aircraft,” wrote the Civil Aeronautics Board in charge of investigating the accident.
Hard bus rides during Winter Dance Party tour, musicians get sick
The musicians had just finished a leg of the “Winter Dance Party” tour at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, on the night of February 2.
The 24-day tour began in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and traveled through Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa in the dead of winter.
“From an organizational point of view, the tour was a complete catastrophe. “Shows were often scheduled hundreds of miles away from each other as they zigzagged through one of the deadliest winters the Midwest had seen in decades, in the worst possible transportation available,” states the ballroom website.
“Musicians were crammed onto a drafty bus to perform in small dance halls and theaters, and by February 1, Carl Bunch (Holly’s drummer) had left with frozen feet.”
Holly, the 22-year-old tour driver, grew tired of broken down buses in frigid temperatures and chartered a four-seater plane to get to the show the next night in Morehead, Minnesota, according to the Civil Aeronautics Board accident report.
Fargo, North Dakota, was the closest airport.
The musician asked his guitarist, Tommy Allsup, and his bassist, Waylon Jennings, to join him.
The tour included Valens, Richardson, Dion and the Belmonts, Frankie Sardo, Jennings, Allsup and Bunch.
Valens, 17, had never been on a small plane before and asked Allsup for his seat, according to the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture.
The two flipped a coin and Valens “won” the seat.
Jennings gave up his seat to the flu-stricken Richardson, according to the accident report.
Jennings told the Country Music Hall of Fame that his last conversation with Holly would always haunt him, even if the words were joking.
After Jennings told Holly he wouldn’t be on the plane, Holly said, “I hope your damn bus freezes again.”
Jennings responded, “I hope your old plane crashes.”
Declining winter weather conditions
Holly, Valens and Richardson arrived at the airport shortly after 1:30 am.
The air was a brisk 15 degrees and winds were blowing around 36 mph at the airport in Mason City, Iowa.
According to the report, a cold front fell from western Minnesota into Nebraska, with a secondary cold front across North Dakota.
The fronts were preceded by widespread snow and gusty winds.
“The temperature and moisture content were such that moderate to heavy precipitation and cloud icing occurred along the route,” the report states.
Air traffic controllers gave pilot Roger Peterson, 21, weather briefings several times from 5:30 p.m. until takeoff.
The pilot had been flying for about five years as a contract commercial pilot and flight instructor for the company that owned the plane, run by Hubert Dwyer.
“He was a young married man who built his life around flying,” the accident report said.
Two controllers gave Peterson weather reports, which included conditions in Mason City and Fargo, along with a waypoint.
Unfortunately, the NWS issued two “urgent advisories” in the evening, indicating worsening conditions.
“None of the communicators could remember bringing these sudden warnings to Pilot Peterson’s attention. Mr. Dwyer said that when he accompanied pilot Peterson to ATCS (Air Traffic Control Service), they were not given any information indicating that instrument meteorological conditions would be encountered along the route.”
Peters was only certified for Visual Flight Rules, or clear weather, not Instrument Flight Rules, flying in the clouds.
He passed the written instrument flight test, but failed the practical flight test nine months before the accident.
He logged 52 hours of instrument training, all taken with a conventional artificial horizon instrument, a gyroscopic horizon.
The gyroscopic horizon, now called the attitude indicator, shows the pilot whether he is flying parallel to the earth, up or down.
The indicator on the ill-fated Beechcraft Bonanza was a different type of indicator, an attitude gyro.
“Exactly the opposite of what the conventional artificial horizon represents,” according to the accident report.
The report noted that ATCS was responsible for providing the pilot with all available information and interpreting the data if requested.
“At Mason City, at the time of takeoff, the barometer was falling, the ceiling and visibility were dropping, light snow had begun to fall, and the winds at the surface and aloft were so strong that one could reasonably have expected to encounter conditions adverse weather conditions during the estimated two-hour flight,” the report continued.
The Analysis section of the accident report painted a tragic picture.
“There is evidence that the weather information consisted solely of the current weather reading at the terminal en route and the terminal’s forecasts for the destination,” the report states.
“If communicators do not draw the pilot’s attention to these warnings and do not emphasize their importance, it could easily lead the pilot to underestimate the severity of the weather situation.”
The air traffic controller and Dwyer watched the plane take off around 1 a.m.
Dwyer told investigators the plane took off normally and climbed.
After about 5 miles, the illuminated tail of the plane gradually descended and then disappeared.
Air traffic attempted to communicate by radio with the pilot but received no response.
The crash
It wasn’t until 9 a.m. that Dwyer, while flying overhead looking for the plane, found it under 4 inches of snow.
Parts covered 540 feet of the remote field and the main remains lay against a barbed wire fence.
The pilot was found on the plane, but the three musicians were ejected.
Investigators found evidence that the plane was configured to cruise and fly at an appropriately high speed, 165-170 mph.
But the plane was actually descending at 3,000 feet per minute and perpendicular to the ground when it hit.
The coroner’s report said the plane skidded and/or rolled 570 feet before the fence stopped it.
“The shape of the mass of the remains approximated a ball with a wing protruding diagonally from one side,” the coroner’s report said.
The analysis noted that strong gusty winds and turbulence would have caused the speed of the climb and turn instruments to fluctuate “to such an extent that an interpretation of these instruments as they relate to attitude control would have been difficult for such an inexperienced pilot.” like Peterson.”
“He may have been confused and thought he was making an upward turn when he was actually making a downward turn,” the report concludes.
The coroner said parts of each body had been frozen during the 10 hours of exposure to about 18 degrees.
The tour director had to tentatively identify each body by its clothing.
Maria Elena Holly told Australian financial review60 years after the accident, he found out on television.
The shock caused her to abort her baby with her husband of 6 months. She missed her funeral.
She was supposed to attend the tour, but canceled when she discovered she was pregnant, according to the review.
She said she was terrified of small planes and that he would never have taken the flight if she had been with him.
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