Beneath starlit skies in perfect flying weather, Eastern Air Lines Flight 663 poised for takeoff at New York's Kennedy Airport. Aboard the four-motor DC-7B—a piston-driven model that Eastern is phasing out—were 79 passengers and a crew of five. Airport, control-tower operators routinely told the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center on Long Island that Flight 663 was about to execute a "Dutch Seven Departure," a takeoff pattern designed to avoid New York City by making a series of turns over the Atlantic before the plane headed toward Richmond and points south.
At 6:19 p.m., New York Control said: "All right, at three miles north of Dutch is Clipper [Pan American Flight] 212 descending to 4,000." A minute later, the Eastern aircraft, piloted by Captain Frederick R. Carson, 41, rose over the ocean. "How does he shape up with that boy coming in . . . the guy at his 1 o'clock position?" asked New York Control. "We're above him," said the radar operator at the airport. Actually Flight 663 was well below Pan American's 212 at the time—but traffic controllers corrected their error almost instantly. Shortly after 6:25 p.m., Eastern's Carson radioed that he was at 3,700 ft., said he saw "the traffic"—the Pan American flight approaching to land. Then Carson signed off, "Good night."
"Yeoh!" At almost the same time, aboard the Pan American jet, the pilot and copilot were taking landing instructions from the tower at Kennedy. Suddenly one of them shouted into the radio, "Yeoh!" Twenty-three seconds later, Pan American 212 radioed to the airport controllers: "We had a close miss here . . . Did you have another target in this area at this same spot where we were just a minute ago?" The tower replied, "Affirmative, however not on my scope at the present time." From the Pan American ship came the first word of disaster: "It looked like he's in the Bay then, because we saw him. He looked like he winged over to miss us and we tried to avoid him, and we saw a bright flash about one minute later. He was well over the top of us, and it looked like he went into an absolute vertical turn and kept rolling." Almost immediately, Air Canada Flight 627, which had taken off minutes before the Eastern Flight, was on the air: "There's a big fire going out on the water here about our 2 o'clock position right now. I don't know what it is. It looked like a big explosion."
The Eastern plane had plunged toward the ocean eight miles off Jones Beach. It blew up in an orange ball of fire at water level, went to the bottom 75 ft. below. At Kennedy Airport the radar operators sounded the alarm the instant they realized that the blip representing Flight 663 had disappeared from their screens.
The Flotsam. Fifteen ships plowed through calm, moonlit seas near the crash scene, and soon eleven helicopters skimmed low over the surface. They dropped flares, illuminated the area with floodlights, held rescue divers at the ready to plunge into the icy water should there be any sign of survivors. There was none.