Eastern Air Lines Flight 663 was an American domestic passenger flight from Boston, Massachusetts, to Atlanta, Georgia, with scheduled stopovers at John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York; Richmond, Virginia; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Greenville, South Carolina. On the night of February 8, 1965, the aircraft serving the flight, a Douglas DC-7, crashed near Jones Beach State Park, New York, just after taking off from JFK Airport. All 79 passengers and five crew aboard died.
The Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) investigation determined that evasive maneuvers undertaken by Flight 663 to avoid an oncoming Pan Am Boeing 707 caused the pilot to suffer spatial disorientation and lose control of the aircraft. The accident is the third-worst accident involving a DC-7.
Flight history
The Douglas DC-7 serving Flight 663 made its first flight in 1958 and subsequently accumulated a total of 18,500 hours of flight time. It was piloted by Captain Frederick R. Carson, 41, who had been employed by Eastern Air Lines for 19 years and who had accumulated 12,607 hours of flight time. His co-pilot, First Officer Edward R. Dunn, 41, a nine-year veteran of Eastern Airlines, had 8,550 hours of flight time. The flight engineer was Douglas C. Mitchell, 24, with two years' employment and 407 pilot hours, and 141 hours of flight engineer time. All had passed proficiency checks with the DC-7B aircraft.
The flight from Logan International Airport in Boston, Massachusetts, to John F. Kennedy International Airport, in New York, proceeded normally. Flight 663 departed JFK at 6:20 p.m. EST on an instrument flight rules (IFR) clearance to Byrd Field (now Richmond International Airport), in Richmond, Virginia.
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|+ Radio conversation between the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center<br />and the JFK control tower
! width="150" style="padding-left: 10px; background-color: #bba; text-align: center;" | Sender
! width="325" style="background-color: #bba;" | Message
! width="25" style="background-color: #bba;" | Ref
|- style="padding-left: 10px;"
| style="text-align: center;" rowspan="2" | New York Air Route Traffic Control Center
| All right, at three miles north of Dutch is Clipper 212 descending to 4,000.
| style="text-align:center;" rowspan="3" | In reality, the traffic, Pan Am 212, was above Flight 663, descending from . Captain Carson acknowledged that he saw the traffic, that he was beginning to turn into the Dutch seven departure, and signed off, saying, "good night". The Pan American 707 was the first to relay news of the crash, as it was receiving permission to land. Air Canada Flight 627, which had departed a few minutes before Flight 663, also radioed news of an explosion in the water. By sunrise, seven bodies had been recovered;
The Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) investigated the accident. The DC-7 was not required to be equipped with a flight recorder, which would have automatically recorded the pilots' every control input. Thus, the CAB was forced to rely on witness testimony, radio recordings, and a best guess based on experience.