Will Rogers Memorial Center
3401 W Lancaster Ave
Fort Worth, TX 76107
I discovered Lynyrd Skynyrd as a teenager in the 1970s, in part through the bargain section at the Air Force base exchange. One of my earliest albums was Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd, a punch-out record from that discounted rack.
I bought a lot of records that way. They were inexpensive enough that I could take chances, and over time that probably helped give me a fairly eclectic taste in music. By roughly 1976 or 1977 I was familiar with Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Pronounced is the album I associate with first knowing “Free Bird.”
At about fifteen or sixteen I was also playing drums in a garage band called The Wizards with two friends who played guitar. I had a large drum kit and tried to play whatever music interested me. Lynyrd Skynyrd was part of that mix, although the strongest pull for me eventually became jazz-rock fusion.
That was approximately the musical perspective I had when Lynyrd Skynyrd's airplane crashed in Mississippi in October 1977. I knew the band and the music. I knew that the crash had happened. I was not yet a pilot, and certainly not someone who could read an aviation accident report with any professional understanding.
The NTSB's final report records what happened in operational terms. On October 20, 1977, L & J Company Convair 240 N55VM was carrying Lynyrd Skynyrd from Greenville, South Carolina, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The aircraft crashed near Gillsburg, Mississippi. Six of the 26 people aboard were killed and the other 20 were injured.
Before the crash, the crew advised air traffic control that the aircraft was low on fuel and requested vectors toward McComb, Mississippi. Both engines subsequently lost power, and the aircraft crashed during the attempted emergency landing.
The NTSB determined that the probable cause was fuel exhaustion and the resulting total loss of power from both engines due to crew inattention to the fuel supply. It identified inadequate flight planning and an undetermined malfunction of the right engine, which resulted in higher-than-normal fuel consumption, as contributing factors.
Three years later, on September 12, 1980, I saw the Rossington Collins Band at Will Rogers Coliseum Auditorium in Fort Worth. The Henry Paul Band was the opener.
I don't have many detailed memories of the concert. I remember the band performing “Don't Misunderstand Me,” which had received radio play, but I can't reconstruct a set list or much of the evening itself. I didn't follow the Rossington Collins Band closely afterward.
At the time, it was a concert by musicians I already knew through Lynyrd Skynyrd. Gary Rossington, Allen Collins, Billy Powell and Leon Wilkeson had survived the crash and were now playing in a new band with Dale Krantz. I understood the connection, but I don't want to give my younger self an interpretation I only developed much later.
What changed was my own experience.
Over the following decades I built a professional aviation career of roughly forty-five years, and I currently fly internationally. Along the way I completed ALPA basic and advanced safety school and accident-investigator training, and I became an accident representative who could support the NTSB on behalf of ALPA if required.
I obviously had no involvement in the Lynyrd Skynyrd investigation; I was fifteen years old. But the training and experience I accumulated later mean that I can read the 1977 report very differently from the teenager who first heard those records.
Fuel state, flight planning, abnormal consumption, crew awareness, the decision to divert, the loss of both engines and the attempt to put an airplane down without power are no longer simply parts of an historical account. They form an operational sequence I can understand in professional terms.
The report also describes the accident as survivable for passengers in portions of the cabin where the fuselage retained its integrity. There was no post-crash fire. All of the surviving passengers were hospitalized, and most suffered multiple fractures and severe lacerations.
That part of the report reads differently to me now as well.
I have survived a serious blunt-force traumatic accident myself. I would not presume from that experience to know what any member of the band thought or felt after the 1977 crash. But I do know something about what serious physical trauma asks of a person afterward: the recovery, the setbacks, the persistence required simply to regain ordinary function, and the determination involved in moving forward when the body has been badly damaged.
Seen from that perspective, the existence of the Rossington Collins Band itself means more to me now than it did in 1980.
Several of the musicians on that stage had survived a catastrophic crash only three years earlier. People they had worked and traveled with had been killed. The survivors had themselves been injured, some seriously. Whatever each of them experienced privately is theirs, and I don't want to invent it. But returning to rehearsals, forming another band, recording new music and going back on tour after an event of that magnitude must have required considerable grit and determination.
That is the part I could not have appreciated properly as a teenager.
At fifteen, catastrophe was something I could understand intellectually. Decades later, after a career spent around aviation safety and after experiencing serious physical trauma myself, I have a much more concrete sense of what survival can demand after the immediate emergency is over.
That changes the way I think about the Rossington Collins concert.
I don't remember enough about the performance to turn it into a detailed concert story, and Lynyrd Skynyrd did not remain at the center of my musical interests. I remember “Don't Misunderstand Me,” I remember being there, and not much more.
But retrospectively, the story carries considerably more weight.
In 1980 I saw musicians I knew from records and from the history of Lynyrd Skynyrd. In 2026, I see something else as well: people who had survived a catastrophic accident, endured serious injury, rebuilt enough of their lives to make music again, and returned to a stage.
I understood the music then.
It took much longer to understand what being on that stage may have required.