Week of Disaster! (Universal Newsreel, Dec 1960)

Description

The original release sheet reads: WEEK OF DISASTER! WORST AIR CRASH IN HISTORY Two huge airliners collide in the skies over New York City, in the worst disaster in aviation history. One, a jet with 84 aboard, crashes in a crowded Brooklyn neighborhood, killing all aboard, and it’s believed, at least 7 on the ground. Houses and shops are shattered by the impact. The other plane, which hits in Staten Island carries to death all 44 aboard. A terrible casualty list to underscore the peril of the traffic jam America’s skies. AIR FORCE PLANE CRASHES IN MUNICH Within 24 hours, an American military transport crashes in a Munich, Germany, street, hitting a crowded streetcar in the heart of the city’s shopping district. All 20 aboard the plane, mostly students going home for the holidays, and 29 on the ground are killed. NEWEST CARRIER A HOLOCAUST In Brooklyn, Navy Yard, an accident during construction work on the “Constellation” turns the Navy’s biggest, newest aircraft carrier into a grisly holocaust. Of 4,200 aboard, most are saved in a massive, heroic rescue operation, but at least 50 are believed dead, and an unknown number trapped in the inferno below the ship’s red-hot deck plates. TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO In Georgia, F.D.R. launches the first Rural resettlement project, offering new homes and new lives to hundreds of poverty-blighted farm families. The first slum-clearance municipal housing is dedicated in New York City by Mrs. Roosevelt as Gov. Lehman and Mayor La Guardia look on. At a special convocation of Notre Dame University, Cardinal Mundelein states the position of the Catholic Church on political activity. In Miami, a daredevil birdman defies gravity to plummet 8,000 feet in a daring acrobatic display.

Collection

MCA/Universal Pictures Collection

Series

Motion Picture Releases of the Universal Newsreel Library