At 9:02 a.m. 47 years ago Thursday, a terrifically hot late September Monday, Pacific Southwest Airlines flight 182 banking steeply over North Park on final approach to Lindbergh Field clipped a four-seat Cessna model 172 on a training flight. The resulting crash killed 137 people in the air and seven on the ground, at the time the nation’s worst air disaster in numbers of deaths.

It remains seared into San Diego’s collective past, symbolized by an iconic photo of the three-engine PSA 727 jet, right wing aflame, plummeting toward homes a block west of I-805 and three blocks south of University Avenue.

Yet long erased from the city’s collective memory is a prior air collision nearly a half-century earlier in 1929 which also exploded in the skies over North Park, less than a mile southeast

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