Eighth-Graders’ NHD Project Looks At An Indiana Tragedy
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David Slone-dslone@timesuniononline.com
Editor’s Note: This is the fifth in a series of stories about Warsaw Community Schools students who advanced to National History Day national competition June 9-13 at the University of Maryland’s campus in College Park, Md.
An Indiana tragedy is the focus of the National History Day project for Zoe Bergan and Kaitlynn McKibbin.
This is the first year the Edgewood Middle School eighth-graders have participated in NHD and advanced to the national contest. The title of their junior group website is “American Eagle Flight 4184.”
NHD offers year-long academic programs that engage over half a million middle- and high-school students around the world annually in conducting original research on historical topics of interest. The largest NHD program is the NHD Contest that encourages more than half a million students around the world to conduct historical research on a topic of their choice. Students enter these projects at the local and state levels, with top students advancing to the national contest at the University of Maryland.
“Our topic is American Eagle Flight 4184 and it’s about a plane that crashed in Roselawn, Indiana, which is about 11⁄2 hours away from here. Unfortunately, no one survived in the plane crash due to icing,” McKibben said.
“The theme (for NHD) this year is ‘Triumph and Tragedy’ and the tragedy is that everyone died, and the triumph is that they learned a lot from the plane crashing and a lot of the rules were changed to make flying safer and close to how it is today,” Bergan explained.
McKibbin said one of the categories for the contest was transportation, so when they were looking for a project they looked into trains and cars but nothing they found was “super interesting” to them. By accident they happened to come across the American Eagle crash and decided that would be a good focal point for their project.
“We had a packet of prize list items, and under Indiana transportation this was one of the topics that was listed. And we thought it looked really unique and would make us stand out, so we decided to look into it. After we did a background on it, we decided that it would be an interesting topic to do,” Bergan further explained.
American Eagle Flight 4184 was a scheduled domestic passenger flight from Indianapolis to Chicago. It crashed into a field on Oct. 31, 1994, after flying into severe icing conditions. All 68 people aboard died in the high-speed impact.
After the crash, Bergan said many types of airplanes like the ATR 72 that had crashed were moved to warmer locations to avoid encountering icing. Changes also were made to the model of the plane.
“There were rules that said you can’t fly in severe icing conditions, but the airlines were still telling their people that they needed to, so the rules were better enforced,” McKibbin said.
Bergan said the way flying is now “is definitely a lot safer. And pilots go through better training programs now. Obviously, they’re very precautious with conditions and there’s a lot of delays and cancellations if they don’t feel it’s safe.”
She said there were other similar crashes to the Roselawn one, but Flight 4184 was the one that changed the rules.
“I thought it was really interesting that a lot of pilots tried to raise their concerns about they were being forced to go fly in the icy conditions,” Bergan said.
Stephen A. Fredrick wrote a book on the crash titled “Unheeded Warning: The Inside Story of American Eagle Flight 4184,” which was published in June 1996.
Bergan said the book talks about “when (the pilots) said they were concerned about the icing conditions, they could lose their jobs or be punished. They were forced to risk their lives and those of everybody on the plane.”
