Free Mayday Over Wichita by D. W. Carter Page A

my chief supporter and advisor, who first read and edited the manuscript and endured my incessant talk about the project and who, above others, understands the solitude of a military historian.
    With much gratitude and affection,
    D. W. C ARTER

EPILOGUE
    History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but the appalling silence and indifference of the good people .
    â€”Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., January 27, 1965 419
    Giants roamed the earth in 1965. Their immense girth, strength and influence pressed heavily upon the masses, and their thundering voices swallowed up headlines for an entire decade. They went by the names of Kennedy, King, Johnson, Chavez, Hoffa and McNamara. They cleared paths, making resonating waves in many areas—politics, civil rights, domestic programs, workers’ rights, labor unions and Vietnam. These giants, it seemed, were invincible, and their weighty, panoptic shadows cast on American society like a thick blanket.
    In the midst of these heavyweights, beneath their towering stature, was the burgeoning city in Kansas named Wichita, which was experiencing its own social upheaval and turmoil as race relations worsened in 1965. And at sixteen days, nine hours and thirty-one minutes into the New Year, disaster struck. Yet, in such a tumultuous, volatile and protean time, the Piatt Street tragedy was but a ripple.
    Four days after the crash, President Lyndon B. Johnson was inaugurated, beginning his quest to achieve the Great Society. Four days after that, suffering from a stroke, Winston Churchill passed away in England, and a month later, Malcolm X was gunned down in New York City. In 1965, black churches burned in the South; murders were rampant in Mississippi; the Vietnam War escalated; race riots broke out in Watts, California; thousands marched in Selma, Alabama; thousands more protested the Vietnam War; and thousands stood up or sat down for equality. No shorter span of time so greatly influenced the course of social America as did the 1960s.
    Meanwhile, as publicity waned and the ’60s grew louder and increasingly violent, the roar over the Piatt Street crash was reduced to a small chatter. Then, with the 1970s bringing its own grief involving plane crashes—the WSU plane crash in October, the Marshall University plane crash in November and another KC-135 crash in Wichita four years later, on March 5, 1974—Piatt Street faded from view.
    Why it took nearly half a century to fully acknowledge the Raggy 42 disaster, why most remained idle while bitterness festered, why hardly any Kansans (in truth, hardly any Wichitans) have knowledge of its occurrence and why so many did so little for so long is a mystery. The seven men serving their nation that morning, and the twenty-three civilians on the ground, deserved more—their lives no less important than any other.
    Perhaps, then, a combination of its location in northeast Wichita, declining race relations, civil unrest, social turmoil, apathy, disinterest, resentment, discord, separatism and a multitude of defining events simultaneously occurring in the compact and strife-filled 1960s is to blame. Whatever the reason, the Piatt Street plane crash was quickly and shamefully forgotten.
    But thankfully, that time has passed. The city has since grown, and race relations have bettered from their once intolerable state. Laws were enacted to expedite settlements and aid victims of such calamities. Wichita’s disaster plan worked and was further enhanced. New families moved into new homes constructed on Piatt Street, and children now frolic on a beautiful playground, where green grass covers the scar of what was once a horrible scene. Off in the distance, a memorial watches over them, ensuring that those who were lost and those who suffered privately for far too long are no longer hidden.
    The giants of that era have