When was the lynyrd skynyrd crash

She said local hospital employees worked through the night to help crash victims without knowing some of them were famous. Sections U. Science Technology Business U.

Mississippi road signs for Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash site. But the band would rise again to bring the music of Skynyrd to an entirely new generation of fans. The pioneering Southern rock band had just released their fifth album, Street Survivors , on Oct. Lynyrd Skynyrd were flying from Greenville, S. If you take the lives of just any seven individuals and follow them, tragedy happens, y'know? And it just happened to us.

And we just kept carryin' on, we're doin' it for the guys that aren't with us, and for us, and for the music and the name and — it's what we are. We grew up together, y'know? We were so happy, and it was a family. Pyle used Mote's phone to call his wife, and Mote's spouse called the local emergency response in the largest,local town, McComb, Mississippi.

Still, Mote was not sure what he was dealing with as he and other neighbors remained skeptical of the bloody individuals on his front porch. Frank and Lawler were the first of the survivors taken to the hospital. Later, Pyle would claim that Johnny Mote actually shot him in the shoulder with his warning shot, but Mote denied this ever happened and subsequent photos show no evidence of the scars that would have ensued from this type of injury.

He convinced Mote that a crash had actually occurred and Mote ultimately let the fireman and his brother Jeffrey onto his property. Wall used a flashlight to cross a creek and when he got to the plane, a Coast Guard helicopter had illuminated it so any forthcoming rescue units could find it. The plane was twisted in pieces, the front part upside down.

Wall saw one of the pilots, hanging from the interior of the cockpit, clearly dead. Several times in the dark, he tripped over human beings who were still alive and used a hatchet to chop away debris and remove survivors from the wreckage.

Eventually, he would be joined by hundreds of people who helped pull survivors out of the plane and walked or stretchered them through creeks and swamp to ambulances as much as a mile away. Although six people were killed, including both pilots, road manager Dean Kilpatrick, Ronnie Van Zant, and Steve and Cassie Gaines, 20 people survived the crash despite horrific injuries.

The Skynyrd tour coincided with the release of Street Survivors , the band's fifth studio album. It was released only three days before the October 20th crash and featured some of the band's best material. Unfortunately, the album cover also featured a photograph of the band engulfed in flames, an unfortunate depiction that MCA Records immediately pulled. Subsequent albums featured a plain black background. Street Survivors reached number five on Billboard's album chart and was the band's second platinum album.

It was propelled by the weirdly prescient and dark "That Smell," a song that includes the lyric, "The smell of death surrounds you! Van Zant had previously admitted writing these lyrics to acknowledge the various car accidents and violent incidents around him. These events had led him to believe that the band was headed for some form of apocalyptic end. A 30th anniversary re-release of the album restored the original cover. Lynryd Skynyrd's first two albums were quite successful and included the signature songs "Free Bird" and "Sweet Home Alabama," which established the band as a viable act.

But less successful efforts eventually created dissension. During the infamous "Torture Tour," a day, date enterprise, lead guitarist Ed King decided that he had had enough. He literally walked out on the band on May 27, , for reasons that are still in dispute. King acknowledges that he never really fit in with the rest of the group, who knew each other from their roots in lower middle class, Jacksonville, Florida. King was a career musician who achieved fame with the one-hit wonder band, Strawberry Alarm Clock.

He achieved immortality by composing the introductory guitar riff for "Sweet Home Alabama. Years later, King was stunned when he visited Gaines's grave, only to find out that they shared the same birthday: September 14, Because their charter plane ran out of gas, most of the injured passengers survived a crash that normally would have burnt them to death.

The official cause of the crash was released in a statement :. Contributing to the fuel exhaustion were inadequate flight planning and an engine malfunction of undetermined nature in the right engine which resulted in higher-than-normal fuel consumption.

This proved only a momentary reprieve for many of the survivors.