Black cumulonimbus clouds rolled in on New York City, darkening the afternoon sky up to nearly 40,000 ft. Lightning bolts darted above Manhattan's skyscrapers. Thunder sporadically overwhelmed the city's normal noises of traffic, subways and sirens. It would be a wet but cool rush hour, a welcome break in the summer's first siege of humid heat.
At Kennedy Airport's long runways along Jamaica Bay in Queens, visibility was two miles, the ceiling 5,000 ft.—both-well beyond landing and takeoff minimums. The arcs of lightning, terrifying to many air travelers, caused little concern among the air-wise. Lightning slips routinely off the skins of modern air: craft, rarely impairing vital controls or igniting the well-protected fuel tanks. J.F.K.'s radar picked up the thunderstorm's ominous hook-shaped rain cells. Rain itself poses no unusual problem for pilots. Yet real dangers lurked invisibly in this storm's particular pattern of high and erratically shifting winds. The airport control tower's landing logs and later explanations by pilots documented the elusive perils.
3:56 P.M. A Flying Tiger DC-8 cargo jet approached Runway 22-L. Suddenly, the unpredictable winds shook the 350,000-lb. plane. Pilot Jack Bliss fought to retain control. "Wind shear on approach," he warned the tower. "The wind pulls you down and turns you over ... you should close that runway." But he landed on it anyway, safely.
3:58 P.M. Eastern Air Lines Flight 902, a Lockheed Tristar jumbo jet, descended toward the same runway. It was caught in the same turbulence, measured at up to 90 m.p.h. Pilot Clifton Nickerson alerted the tower to the "wind shear and turbulence." Struggling, in his term, to "save it," he prudently pulled the huge craft back into the air and off to a safe landing at nearby Newark Airport. Some of his passengers grumbled about the "poor service."
4 P.M. Arriving from Helsinki, a Finnair DC-8 touched down uneventfully on Runway 22-L.
4:03 P.M. A small, private twin-engine Beechcraft Baron, more susceptible to wind conditions than the big airliners, landed on the same strip without difficulty.
4:06 P.M. Twenty minutes late on its nonstop run from New Orleans, Eastern's Flight 66 headed toward the same runway. A stretched version of the Boeing 727, its three jet engines mounted at its tail, the plane carried 116 passengers and a crew of eight. Its pilot, Captain John W. Kleven, 54, only minutes earlier had been advised by the tower of the complaint about wind shear made by Eastern 902's pilot. Unlike his fortunate predecessor, however, Kleven was unable to "save it."
Descending over sparsely populated marshland at the airport's northeastern edge, the blue-and-white airliner roared in, fatally low and short of the runway. Still a full 2,300 ft. from 22-L but otherwise on course, it struck a row of 22-ft. towers supporting the runway approach lights. It clipped three of them. Then, in what may have been a final valiant effort by the pilot to regain control, it momentarily cleared the next three. Finally, it plunged into four more.