Flight 932: The 1970 Marshall Plane Crash and the Story of an American Town

On the rainy evening of November 14, 1970, a chartered jetliner crashed on its approach to Tri-State Airport in Huntington, West Virginia. All seventy-five passengers were killed, including most of Marshall University's Thundering Herd football team, its coaches and staff, prominent community members, and the flight crew. The loss of Southern Airways Flight 932—later memorialized in the film We Are Marshall (2006)—remains the single worst air tragedy in US sports history. Known as the "Marshall plane crash," the accident devastated not only Marshall's student body and employees but the community of Huntington, and its impact was felt far beyond.Flight 932 reconstructs the Marshall plane crash and its ripple effects, blending research on collective trauma with the profiles and testimonies of surviving loved ones, witnesses, and officials who remain deeply affected by it decades later. This composite approach yields the story of an American town struggling to make sense of the horrors of a catastrophe and finding a way to forge ahead in the aftermath. Read more