An Eerie Visual

So how eerie is this visual?



Bits and pieces from the AP story this morning:

~ CHICAGO - A jetliner with more than 100 people aboard skidded across a Chicago runway Thursday evening, slammed through a fence and struck two vehicles in the street, pinning one beneath it. A 6-year-old boy in one car was killed, and 10 other people, including two in the plane, were injured, authorities said.

Flight 1248 from Baltimore touched down around 7:15 p.m. Though the airport had about 7 inches of snow, aviation officials said conditions at the time were acceptable. The Boeing 737 and the vehicles remained in the streets Friday.

Southwest CEO Gary Kelly said the plane had circled Midway for 30 to 35 minutes because of the weather and the flight traffic before it was cleared for landing on the airport's 6,500-foot runway. The airport, surrounded by homes and businesses, has shorter runways than most major airports, because it was originally built to handle smaller propeller planes. The larger ones land at O'Hare.

The accident happened 33 years to the day after a crash at Midway that killed 45 people, two of them on the ground. Eighteen other passengers survived. In that crash, a United Airlines jet struck tree branches about a mile from the airport, then hit the roofs of a number of bungalows before plowing into a home, bursting into flames. Among the dead were Dorothy Hunt, the wife of Watergate figure E. Howard Hunt, and CBS newswoman Michele Clark. ~


Note to self: Never live near an airport.