A midafternoon with fair skies turned into horror for a Midwest City neighborhood on Aug. 25, 1961, when a fully fueled jet fighter crashed and exploded on the doorsteps of several homes.
The pilot of an F-100 jet had ejected safely, but the inferno that burned on the ground engulfed at least eight houses, killing 2-year-old Tibbie Lynn Tuttle and her sister, 4-year-old Judith Ann, and injuring at least seven others, including the Tuttles’ mother and brother.
The fiery explosion of the plane, which had just refueled at Tinker Air Force Base, shook the area in the 300 block of Ferguson Drive at about 3:45 p.m. on a Friday afternoon.
Neighbors as well as emergency workers from Midwest City, Del City, Nichols Hills, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma County and Tinker arrived quickly to help survivors and battle the blaze that engulfed homes and cars.
A story in The Daily Oklahoman about the crash reported 1st Lt. W.H. Barbour had just “re-fueled his jet at Tinker with a mixture of gasoline and kerosene and had taken off when the fire warning light on his instrument panel flashed.”
Barbour was among pilots of 16 jets who were flying from South Carolina to Nevada and who had refueled at Tinker. A fellow jet pilot pulled alongside Barbour midair and could see flames through a hole in the plane’s fuselage, so Barbour tried to return to the air base, the story reported. Unfortunately, Barbour lost directional control of the jet, leading to his decision to eject. He parachuted safely to the school yard at nearby Glenwood School.
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Regret could be detected in Barbour’s quotes in an Aug. 27, 1961, follow-up story in The Daily Oklahoman:
“If I could have stayed aloft one more second, the plane would have missed hitting the houses. In 20 more seconds, it would have made the runway.”
The 27-year-old Greenville, South Carolina, pilot was trying to land on the north runway at Tinker.
“I had it in a curve that would make it miss everything. I did everything I could do, but I lost 100 percent control.”
Air Force and civilian investigators from South Carolina arrived following the crash.
Maj. Gen. Lewis H. Mundell, commander of Tinker Air Force Base at that time, told The Daily Oklahoman there had been concern about housing areas near air bases, but added the area around Tinker was one of the least congested, “with residences on only one approach” to the base.
A few days after the crash, Oklahoma U.S. Sen. Mike Monroney introduced a bill into Congress that would allow the Air Force to pay large claims that might arise from the accident in the Midwest City neighborhood. Monroney was reported as saying:
“There is, of course, no way to compensate or repay families that have suffered these tragic losses. However, the least we can do is to settle the claim as fairly and quickly as possible.”
On Oct. 4, 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed the legislation into law.
In December 1961, the Tuttle family sued the federal government, and in May 1962 the Midwest City family received $431,932, according to a report in The Daily Oklahoman.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Midwest City plane crash in 1961 engulfed neighborhood, killed 2