Have We Ever Had A Commercial Airline Flight Crash In North Dakota?

It seems like every time I turn on the TV news of late, it's showing close calls for commercial airlines.

We don't have to go back too far on the last commercial airline with a fatal accident in the United States. The memory is still way too fresh of an American Airlines Regional jet colliding with an army helicopter that killed 67 people with zero survivors. This happened on January 29th at the Ronald Reagen Washington International Airport in DC.

No doubt, you have seen the video of this tragic crash, that has airport officials and experts trying to figure out how this could ever happen.

I feel like I have a dark connection with airline crashes, as I have a reoccurring dream where I witness a commercial airline plane crashing to the earth into a fiery ball of flames. It's terrifying, to be honest.

You would think this would keep me from flying, but I actually enjoy flying very much. Admittedly, it's probably a good thing I don't fly a whole lot. The man upstairs might be trying to tell me something.

After that tragic day over the Potomac River, it got me thinking. Have we ever had a commercial airline crash with fatalities in North Dakota? (Not including cargo planes)

We must have had one before right?

I tried reaching out to the four major airports in the state, Grand Forks, Fargo, Minot, and Bismarck to see if they had such information. Unfortunately, in this automated world, it was difficult to find a live body to speak to.

I did chat with an airport administrator at the Grand Forks International Airport (GFK), and he went back through their records to the 60s, and there has not been a single fatality with a commercial airliner. He added, that there have certainly been incidents over the years but nobody has lost a life.

I did find a list of all fatal incidents involving commercial airline carriers in the United States on Wikipedia.

I went through a very long list of every deadly commercial airline crash in America, and I could not find a single incident where somebody had lost their life on North Dakota soil. Now, obviously, there have been many private planes that have had fatalities, but ZERO on the commercial side.

However, there was one deadly crash that was just a couple of miles from North Dakota. 

This happened back in 1941. Northwest Airlines Flight 5 was flying from Minneapolis to Fargo when the plane crashed in a field near Moorhead, Minnesota. It was determined the cause of the crash was due to severe icing that developed on the wings of the plane.

The only survivor of this deadly incident was the captain of the plane. 14 people lost their lives, and what is ironic, the surviving captain would die a year later in another aviation accident.

That's it. States like Alaska, California, and New York have had numerous deadly commercial airline accidents. Even Minnesota has had several commercial airline crashes, but North Dakota has had ZERO. I think that is pretty impressive. Let's hope it stays that way for years to come.