At 8:35 p.m. on May 22, 1962, Continental Airlines Flight 11 — a Boeing 707 registered N70775 — departed O'Hare International Airport in Chicago for Kansas City, Missouri, carrying 37 passengers and 8 crew. The flight was routine until it deviated north of its filed plan to avoid a line of thunderstorms near the Mississippi River.
At approximately 9:17 p.m., an explosion ripped through the right rear lavatory. The blast severed the aircraft's tail section, sending the rear fuselage and engines detaching from the main body. The aircraft pitched nose-down in uncontrolled gyrations and struck an alfalfa field near Unionville, Putnam County, Missouri, at 9:22 p.m. All 45 people aboard were killed — 44 dead at the scene, one who survived briefly died of internal injuries at a hospital in Centerville, Iowa, about ninety minutes later.
The perpetrator was Thomas G. Doty, a 34-year-old Kansas City man facing an upcoming armed robbery trial who had purchased more than $300,000 in life insurance — including policies bought at the airport just before boarding — to provide for his wife and five-year-old daughter. He brought six sticks of dynamite aboard in his briefcase, entered the lavatory, and ignited the device. The scheme was intended to appear as a genuine accident, with his family collecting the insurance payout.
The crash was the first confirmed commercial aviation suicide bombing in U.S. history. The investigation, led by the FBI, pieced together evidence including Doty's insurance purchases, his recent acquisition of dynamite, and testimony from those who saw him at the gate just before departure. Within days, investigators had identified Doty as the bomber based on insurance records, passenger manifests, and the pattern of the explosion in the rear lavatory. The case reshaped commercial aviation security protocols around insurance verification and passenger screening.
Forty-five people died in the disaster: Captain Fred R. Gray, 50, with 25,000 total flight hours; First Officer Edward J. Sullivan, 41, with 14,500 hours; Flight Engineer Roger D. "Jack" Allen, 32; a purser; four stewardesses; and 37 passengers. Among the passengers was a 27-year-old man who survived the initial impact and was taken to a hospital in Centerville, Iowa, where he died approximately ninety minutes after the crash — the only victim to reach medical care alive. Wreckage was scattered across a six-mile path across rural farmland, with the tail section found nearly a mile from the main fuselage.
The case became a landmark in aviation safety history, illustrating how a single individual's desperate financial circumstances and access to explosives could circumvent existing safeguards. The National Transportation Safety Board and FBI findings directly informed later changes to airport passenger screening and insurance anti-fraud measures. The crash site near Unionville, Missouri, became the location of a memorial in 2010, placed by community members and victims' families. Survivors and witnesses reported seeing a flash in the sky and hearing the aircraft breakup — a scene described in oral histories from rural Missouri and Iowa residents who heard the explosion on a stormy spring evening. Annual memorial services have continued in Unionville, drawing victims' family members and community survivors to commemorate those lost.
The victims of Flight 11 represent an unremarkable cross-section of American air travelers in 1962 — business travelers, families, and airline crew going about ordinary lives. The event stands as a historical inflection point in understanding how personal desperation can interact with systemic vulnerabilities, and how investigations rebuild events from fragments scattered across multiple miles of farmland. In the months following the crash, the Civil Aeronautics Board issued new guidance on passenger screening and luggage matching that became standard practice across the U.S. commercial aviation industry.