Only the pilot lived to tell the horrific story of one of Minnesota’s worst aviation disasters

Editor's note: This archival Vault article was first published Oct. 30, 2022.

MOORHEAD, Minn. — The residents of Fargo-Moorhead had probably not even had their first sip of coffee that Thursday morning Oct. 30, 1941, when they picked up a special edition of The Fargo Forum the newsboy had dropped at their doorstep.

The giant all-caps headline shouted “14 KILLED IN FIERY CRASH OF NORTHWEST AIRLINER HERE.”

It was shocking news, of course, made all the more shocking when they realized by the end of the day, not only was this the worst aviation disaster in Minnesota history at the time, but with another crash in Ontario that same day, October 30 had become the deadliest day in the history of commercial aviation up to that point.

Northwest Airlines Flight 5 was a regularly scheduled, multiple-stop flight from Chicago to Seattle. It had intermediate stops at Minneapolis, Fargo, Billings and Butte, Montana; and Spokane, Washington. Its passenger list read like a “Who’s Who.”

“Flying in 1941 was still an expensive alternative to rail travel,” said Clay County archivist Mark Peihl. “Flight 5’s 12 passengers reflected this. All but two were business travelers.”

It carried three company presidents, three sales managers, two prominent business owners, an attorney and the state chairman of a political party. (See the full list of the victims below).

The pilot of the plane was 41-year-old Clarence Bates, who had logged more than 7,000 air hours. He reported no issues with the Douglas DC-3A-269, until Barnesville, when he started to notice some light ice forming on the wings, but he said later, not enough to worry about.

According to reports, the plane was making a routine instrument approach to the Fargo airport around 1:54 a.m when Bates passed over Hector Field at 600 feet to see if he could break through the clouds.

He circled back over the Red River into Minnesota in preparation for the landing. Later he said, “this is when the plane started to act peculiarly and I knew something was the matter.”

The airport never heard from the plane again.

With the airport now out of touch, reports of what happened fell upon witnesses who were in the area in those early morning hours. They watched in shock as Flight 5 crashed on the grounds of the Moorhead Rod and Gun Club, one-and-a-half miles north of Moorhead at 2 a.m.

Reporters interviewed several people who were first on the scene of the crash. The Fargo Forum printed their accounts verbatim. The following audio clips are the actual words of the witnesses read by current Forum Communications journalists.

The first witness on the scene was E.M. Gregory, an official with the Great Northern Railroad who tells the harrowing story of finding the dazed pilot, who had been ejected through the windshield upon impact. He had been thrown 250 feet from the plane. Bloodied and injured, Bates was trying to make it back to the plane to rescue his passengers and the rest of his crew.

The couple Gregory mentioned running into was Eveline Berg, a “Fargo beauty operator” and her companion Charles Bailly of Columbus, Ohio. The two had been out at a nightclub when they heard a commotion on the outskirts of town. They got in the car to see what was going on.

Help arrived in the form of Ralph Yoder, an ambulance driver who was called to bring Bates to the hospital. The weather conditions and terrain made it difficult to get the upset and incoherent Bates to the hospital.

As Yoder said, one of Bates’ requests was that someone calls his wife, Virginia, back in Minneapolis to tell her he was okay. She relived the night with a reporter the next day while visiting her husband in the hospital. As the paper said, in true pilot wife form, she seemed "unruffled."

Of course, the person everyone wanted to hear from was Bates. When he had been brought to the hospital, he was unaware that everyone on the plane, except him, had been killed. They broke the news to the devastated pilot the next day.

Considering what he had gone through, his injuries were fairly minor. He had cuts to his head and arm, cracked vertebrae, and damage to his right hand and arm.

Authorities wasted no time talking to him about the crash, questioning him beside his bed at St. John’s Hospital. His account of the night is terrifying - feeling unable to do anything, while the plane he knew so well seemed to be unresponsive to his every move.

Bates was released from the hospital a week later. After the inquiry, Bates was ruled not to be at fault for the crash. His survival proved to be a blessing for authorities working to make air travel safer. Pilots don’t often survive crashes like this one. So his report of the final moments of the flight helped pinpoint what went wrong and how it could be prevented in the future.

The investigators ruled that the cause of the crash was not just the ice build-up on the wings, but the inability of the plane to respond with full-power. Also at fault, they said, was the failure of the Northwest dispatcher “to recognize the seriousness of weather conditions in Fargo,” and offer Bates an alternative landing site.

Meteorologist Daryl Ritchison, director of the North Dakota Agricultural Weather Network, said given that it was 1941 and with weather information available at the time, the pilot would have likely been easily caught off guard.

"The temperature dropped from just above freezing to below freezing from midnight to 2 a.m. just before the crash," Ritchison said, "Also, light fog developed during that time frame and mist/drizzle was reported just before and during the crash period. All would attribute to icing as the plane was moving into lower altitude."

Sadly, Bates would not be so lucky next time. Almost a year to the date of the Moorhead crash, on Oct. 31, 1942, (with World War II now underway) Bates was killed when the B-24 bomber he was test-flying crashed in St. Paul.

• Emory A. King, 45,  Fargo, president of the Dakota Tractor Company
• Ned Wells, Fargo, 41, sales manager of the Dakota Tractor Company
• A. F. Simonson, 42, of Grand Forks, owner of several businesses 
• Helen Ford, of Fargo and Minneapolis
• Clarke W. Farup, 45, of Grafton, North Dakota, owner of Ford auto agencies
• Caroline Packard, 50, of Atlantic City, New Jersey, on her way to visit her sister in Seattle
• Henry G. Klopp, 68, of Spokane, Washington, president of the White Pine Sash Company, on his way to see his critically ill wife after attending his mother’s funeral in Indiana
• Lynn C. Carr, 34, of Highland Park, Illinois, traffic representative for Northwest Airlines
• W. A. Metzger, age unavailable, of New York City, sales manager for Royal Typewriter Company
• A. H. Brown, 60, of Billings, Montana, attorney and chairman of Montana State Republican Central Committee
• Fred R. Lowell, 38, of Springfield, Ohio, sales manager for the National Supply Company
• R. W. Ramsey, age unavailable, of North Canton, Ohio, president of Ramsey Lumber Company
• Co-pilot, Alden Onsgard, 25, Minneapolis
• Flight attendant Bernice Blowers, 25, Welcome, Minnesota

• The crash was the deadliest in the state's history up to that point. The current most deadliest aviation disaster in the state occurred in 1993, when Northwest Flight 5719 crashed in Hibbing, killing 18 people.
  
• Flight attendant Bernice Blowers was engaged to be married. Her fiance’ told authorities he asked Bernice to get a substitute for the flight so she could go dancing with him. But she felt it was her duty to fly. Both her engagement ring and wings were found in the wreckage.
  

  

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• Co-pilot Alden Onsgard left dentistry school to be a pilot because he said “there is no excitement in pulling teeth.”
• The plane carried more than 750 pounds of mail destined for Fargo, Montana and Washington. About 100 pounds were recovered from the wreckage and taken to the Fargo Post Office, where clerks salvaged 898 pieces - readable but with marks from the fire.
• Page 12 of The Fargo Forum on Nov. 2, 1941 was a lesson in contrast. Stories toward the top of the page include details of the investigation into the Moorhead crash as well as information about a very similar crash in Ontario on Oct. 30 which killed 20. But at the bottom of the page is a photo of a grandfather giving his granddaughter a plane ticket for her birthday with the headline, “Celebrate Birthdays With Plane Trip.”

Editor's note: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of the headline for this article incorrectly labeled this crash as the worst in Minnesota's history, when in fact it was the worst up to that point in history. Additionally, the deadliest aviation crash in Minnesota's history is currently the 1993 Northwest Flight 5719 crash in Hibbing, which killed18 people.