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Two days earlier, a "fun festival" in the West German city of Mannheim had also turned into a kind of aerial hell. One of the festivities scheduled for the city's 375th anniversary celebration was an air show highlighted by a free-fall parachute jump involving 39 German, British, U.S. and French skydivers, four of them women. The jump never took place. Instead, horrified onlookers saw the U.S. Army CH-47 Chinook helicopter that was practicing for the event suddenly lose a blade from one of its twin rotors, then plunge 1,200 ft. onto the dividing rail of a nearby autobahn. All the parachutists died, along with five helicopter crewmen and two American Forces news staffers. All U.S. Army Chinooks were grounded for a "precautionary period" while investigators probed the accident, a process that might take two weeks.
Only 65 miles away, residents of the village of Schönaich mourned the victims of another weekend tragedy. Forty members of a Schönaich sports club were on a bus returning from a weekend excursion when, inexplicably, the woman in charge of lowering the gates at a level crossing near the Swiss town of Fehraltdorf failed to do so as a three-car regional train approached. The train hit the middle of the bus, killing 38 passengers and the bus driver. It was the worst railway accident in Switzerland since 1891.