“The Miracle Landing”

A True Story of How The Minneapolis Lakers Almost Perished & The Crew That Saved Them

The Minneapolis Lakers national basketball team may have perished in a flight over Iowa on one cold, winter night, had it not been for some quick thinking in the cockpit.

It was a rough couple of years for the NBA’s Minneapolis Lakers. But at least the 1959-60 season had a promising start. Team owner Bob Short had drafted college standout Elgin Baylor the year before and was rebuilding his team around this future superstar. Adding Jim Pollard as the new coach with a dose of hometown enthusiasm, had fans looking up. The team even bought a DC-3 so they could play teams further away in the newly expanding National Basketball Association (NBA). Then something happened that almost changed everything the evening of January 17, 1960, following a game in St. Louis. The Minneapolis Lakers boarded the team’s DC-3 for the flight home, piloted by Captain Verne Ullman and copilot Harold Gifford.

The weather that night was not good and called for a good chance of icing, but the crew boarded the team and took off, anyway.

They were flying in pitch darkness when the crew lost both generators and the plane’s batteries were drained. The only emergency procedure they could follow was to fly the plane and find a safe place to land as soon as possible.

Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper perished in an Iowa cornfield only 11 months earlier. Would this incident be a repeat of this accident?

What went wrong on this flight…what went right to make for a safe landing? Any pilot who has experienced instrument flight conditions at night in the winter will be able to relate to this incident – the rest of us will be able to learn from it as copilot Harold Gifford of Woodbury, Minnesota, gives his account of what happened.

Gifford has had a very diverse career in military and commercial aviation. He is a World War II veteran of the U.S. Army Air Corps and after a 29-year career, he retired as a Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Air Force Reserve.

The Miracle Landing  (ISBN: 978-1-935991-97-7, 174 pages, $13.99, Non-fiction/Sports History), published by Signalman, is available in paperback or as an ebook at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com, the Apple iBookstore, and wherever fine books are sold.

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