Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 307 Crash (1950)

March 7, 1951

On the evening of March 7, 1950, a Northwest Orient Airlines Martin 2-0-2 clipped a flagpole at Fort Snelling National Cemetery while approaching Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, tearing away part of its left wing. The crippled aircraft plunged into a house in the Lynnhurst neighborhood of Minneapolis, killing all 13 people aboard and two children asleep inside the home. The disaster remains one of the deadliest aviation accidents in Minnesota history and exposed critical flaws in low-visibility approach procedures of the era.

A Long Multi-Stop Journey

Flight 307 was a scheduled domestic-to-international service that began in Washington, D.C., and wound its way westward through a chain of American cities before crossing into Canada. Its full itinerary took it from Washington to Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Madison, and Rochester before reaching the Twin Cities, with a final leg planned to Winnipeg, Manitoba. The aircraft assigned to the route, a twin-engine Martin 2-0-2 registered N93050, was a relatively new type in commercial service, prized by airlines for its speed and unpressurized simplicity on short- to medium-haul hops. By the time the flight approached Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport on the night of March 7, 1950, it carried three crew members and ten passengers, all of whom had already endured a long day of stops across the industrial Midwest. Weather conditions in the Twin Cities that evening were poor, with low clouds and reduced visibility complicating the final approach. As the pilots worked to bring the airplane down safely, they had to navigate near Fort Snelling, a historic Army post and national cemetery situated close to the airport's approach path. It was in this final, fateful stretch of the journey that the flight's routine descent turned into a catastrophe that would claim fifteen lives before the night was over.

Collision with a Flagpole and a Fatal Descent

As the Martin 2-0-2 descended toward Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, it struck a flagpole standing at Fort Snelling National Cemetery, the historic burial ground for U.S. military veterans adjacent to the airport grounds. The impact damaged the aircraft's left wing, and the flight crew, recognizing the danger, attempted to divert and make an emergency landing rather than continue toward the runway. During this desperate maneuver, a section of the already-weakened left wing separated entirely from the airplane, instantly robbing the pilots of the lift and control needed to keep the aircraft airborne. With the wing structure compromised, the Martin 2-0-2 became uncontrollable and went into a fatal descent over the residential streets of south Minneapolis. The stricken airliner came down in the Lynnhurst neighborhood, slamming into the home of the Doughty family. The crash and resulting fire destroyed the house and killed everyone aboard the aircraft: all three crew members and all ten passengers perished. Tragically, the destruction was not confined to the airplane's occupants. Two young children, Janet and Tom Doughty, were inside the house at the time and did not survive, along with the family's pet dog. The scene left a residential block scarred by wreckage and fire, and shocked a community unaccustomed to seeing air disasters unfold on their own streets.

Investigation, Toll, and Lasting Impact

In the aftermath, investigators focused on how a commercial airliner came to strike a fixed obstacle like a cemetery flagpole during a routine instrument approach, pointing to questions about altitude, visibility, and approach procedures used at Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport at the time. The accident claimed fifteen lives in total: the three-member flight crew, ten passengers, and Janet and Tom Doughty, the two children killed inside their own home. The loss of an entire family's young children alongside the deaths of everyone aboard the flight made the tragedy especially wrenching for the Lynnhurst community and for Minneapolis at large. The crash prompted renewed scrutiny of obstacle clearance around approach paths near the airport, particularly given Fort Snelling's proximity to incoming flight corridors. Incidents like Flight 307 contributed to the broader postwar push for improved instrument landing systems, better obstruction lighting and marking, and more rigorous approach-path planning near U.S. airports. For Northwest Orient Airlines, then a major carrier connecting the Upper Midwest to destinations across the country and into Canada, the disaster added to a difficult stretch of high-profile accidents in the early 1950s that spurred internal safety reviews. Today, the crash of Flight 307 is remembered as a sobering reminder of how a single obstacle collision, compounded by an inflight structural failure, could turn a scheduled multi-city passenger flight into one of Minnesota's deadliest aviation tragedies.