Some squawks on the old police/fire scanner stick in the memory longer than others. And Feb. 8, 2000, was just another 33-degree afternoon in the slog of February until the News-Sun’s scanner crackled with words not normally heard: “Plane crash.”
The subsequent events would remind everyone that a boring day in late winter is better than a bad day in the air for pilots.
“I was on the phone, looking out the kitchen window, talking with my mom about some ingredients for a recipe she wanted,” said Tom Kane, a Zion-Benton High School student who had just come home for the day. “Then I just heard this noise; a loud noise like something blew up. So then I looked out the window and saw these two planes kind of coming apart from each other.
“One plane went across that way,” Kane said, pointing west toward Midwestern Regional Medical Center, and then he pointed right in the middle of Elim Avenue. “The other one came down right over there, real fast and upside down.”
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Kane shared his story with more than one inquiring reporter that gloomy afternoon. When he gave those quotes to me, I remember the ink in my pen froze up. A pencil had to be located.
His basic description told the tale in accurate broad strokes. As detailed in a subsequent National Transportation Safety Board report, at around 3:04 p.m., two single-engine planes — a Moravan Zlín 242L and a Cessna 172 — “collided in flight over a residential area of Zion, Illinois, approximately 2 miles from the approach end of runway 23 at the Waukegan Regional
The report added that the Zlin had punched a 7-by-6-foot hole in the roof of Midwestern Regional Medical Center a block west of Sheridan Road, while the Cessna came to rest on Elim after striking a tree and a sidewalk.
“Both airplanes were destroyed on impact,” the report stated clinically. “The pilot and passenger on board (the Zlin) were fatally injured. The student pilot of (the Cessna) was also fatally injured
Bob Collins was Chicago’s top-rated morning radio host until his death in February 2000 after his and a student pilot’s plane collided upon approach to the runway at Waukegan Regional Airport.
It would not be long before word began to leak that one of the victims was familiar to millions of people in a world that was then dominated by what we now know as terrestrial radio — Bob Collins, who had ruled the regional airwaves since the late 1980s as WGN-AM’s morning host, had been piloting the Zlin.
Longtime News-Sun reporters Chris Brenner and Ralph Zahorik were also on the scene following the crash, and Brenner’s front-page story the next day is a master class of concise storytelling with veteran insight:
“The mid-air collision over downtown Tuesday that took the life of popular Chicago radio personality Bob Collins and two others was horrific for the havoc it wreaked and miraculous for the damage it did not create.
“Collins, 57, and his Mettawa neighbor, Herman Luscher, 58, were in a Zlin 242 aircraft that collided with a Cessna 172 piloted by a Chicago woman at 3:04 p.m., sending Collins’ plane spiraling into the roof of Midwestern Regional Medical Center.
“The woman’s Cessna plunged into a residential neighborhood, landing in a crumpled heap in the street close to homes and a nursing care center with 210 residents.”
Brenner’s report added that there were more than 300 people in the 95-bed hospital at the time of the crash, because a shift change was approaching. The Zlin exploded shortly after smashing into the fifth floor, injuring two people inside offices and conference rooms.
More than 25 fire departments from Lake County and southern Wisconsin responded to the scene, with some of them checking homes and businesses surrounding the hospital “in an effort to find patients who might have wandered into them or were taken in by neighbors after the crash. “
“It was a fireman’s worst nightmare,” Zion Fire Department Capt. Mike Stried told Brenner. “There were a lot of situations that were dangerous.”
Though it would be hours before officials would confirm that Collins was involved in the crash, the information spread quickly among journalists at the scene. We heard a rescue worker had been one of the first to the roof and had immediately recognized Collins.
Over on Elim, a 31-year-old student pilot named Sharon Hock would eventually be identified as the Cessna pilot. Zahorik, who quoted multiple witnesses, wrote how the crippled plane “ripped through trees and demolished a swing in front of the Sheridan Health Care Center” then dented a parked minivan before coming to a stop.
“The plane barely missed hitting a car driving down the street, a witness said,” Zahorik wrote. “Hundreds of people gathered on Elim, behind police lines, staring at the twisted, mangled wreckage of a white and blue-trimmed aircraft that had plunged from a clear, cold sky on a bright, sunny day in the middle of a normally quiet residential neighborhood a block east of Zion’s Sheridan Road downtown.”
Twenty years later, the crash’s legacy is seen in radar that was added to what is now Waukegan National Airport, which has not had a major incident since that unforgiving afternoon
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