75 years ago a plane crashed into a Minneapolis family’s house. What happened?

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The creekside block where Emerson Avenue meets Minnehaha Parkway in south Minneapolis was peaceful on a recent afternoon — the only sounds coming from dog walkers and planes passing overhead.

But on a snowy night here 75 years ago, all was chaos.

A memorial plaque on a boulder by Minnehaha Creek marks the moment that the unthinkable suddenly happened: On March 7, 1950, Northwest Airlines Flight 307 fell from the sky onto the home that once stood across the street from the marker. Fifteen people were killed, including two children sleeping in the house.

When Mark Raderstorf first moved to the neighborhood in the late 1980s, he learned about the tragedy from a neighbor who witnessed it.

“We got together at block parties, and then she started talking about this plane crash in the neighborhood, that she was on the block when it happened,” he said. “Her house became kind of media central for all the out-of-town reporters that came in.”

Raderstorf asked Curious Minnesota, the Strib’s reader-powered reporting project, to delve into what happened when the plane went down that night in 1950. He recently wrote an article about the crash in the Southwest Connector newspaper.

He also wondered: The shocking crash led many residents to call for moving the airport — an idea that was revisited several times through the decades. Why did it stay put?

The crash of Flight 307 was the deadliest aviation disaster in Minnesota history up to that point, said Bill Convery, director of research at Minnesota Historical Society.

“It was … all of the perfect conditions coming together for something like this to happen,” Convery said. The chain of events “led to a really freakish and kind of one-in-a-million chance of an accident.”

One of the most striking aspects of the tragedy is how sudden it was, Convery said.

“One moment, everybody ... was going about their business, making dinner, on the telephone, watching a Lakers game — Minneapolis Lakers — and going to the movie theater,” he said. “A moment later, with no warning whatsoever, they were in the middle of a catastrophe.”

The plane, a Martin 202, was en route from Madison, Wis., to Rochester when it was diverted to Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (then called Wold-Chamberlain Field), the Minneapolis Morning Tribune reported the day after the disaster.

The aircraft’s left wing struck a flagpole at Fort Snelling National Cemetery and was damaged as the pilot circled to land in the blinding snowstorm.

Losing altitude, Capt. Donald Jones made another attempt. But a big piece of the wing then fell off above the Washburn Water Tower. Then, the plane crashed into the residential neighborhood.

“I heard a roar, looked up and saw the plane,” a high school student told the Tribune. “I could tell it was in trouble. I could see the red and green riding lights. It banked left, then plummeted down at a sharp angle.”

Three homes on the block were damaged in the crash and resulting fire. The Doughty family home at 1116 W. Minnehaha Parkway was destroyed.

Franklin and Marie Doughty and oldest daughter Dianne, 15, were downstairs watching the Minneapolis Lakers game on television when “all of a sudden the house exploded,” Dianne recalled to the Star Tribune many years later.

Dianne dove through a window into the front yard, and her parents followed.

But the two youngest Doughty children, Janet, 10, and Tommy, 8, were killed in their beds upstairs. All three crew members and 10 passengers aboard the aircraft also died.

The first police officer at the scene later told the Star Tribune that he saw the plane’s fuselage and tail jutting out from the house in an “inferno.”

The Civil Aeronautics Board inquiry revealed that other pilots had reported mechanical difficulties with their landing systems that night and that there had also been a power outage at the airport.

But in the end, investigators found that the crash happened because the pilot attempted to land “visually” — on his own, without using the plane’s guiding instruments. He then lost sight of the ground in the storm, veering too low and off course.

The crash “reawakened agitation” to shift airport operations to Anoka County, according to the Minneapolis Star. But considering the amount of money that had already been invested in Wold-Chamberlain, stakeholders viewed building a similar airport elsewhere as too time consuming and expensive.

“The authorities are agreed that you can’t locate metropolitan airports so as to remove the possibility of danger,” the paper wrote.

For decades, the 1950 crash largely faded from public memory. A new one-story home was built where the Doughtys once lived, and given a different house number.

In 1993, the Northwest Airlink Flight 5719 crash in Hibbing claimed 18 lives, surpassing the Minneapolis catastrophe to become the deadliest in state history, Convery said.

Then, in 2011, former City Council Member Mark Kaplan successfully led efforts to memorialize the 1950 tragedy with the creekside marker.

That year, surviving daughter Dianne Doughty-Madsen told the Star Tribune that she had mostly kept memories of the crash to herself, not wanting to further sadden her parents.

“I put up a good front for them,” she said. It felt good to finally talk about what happened, she said, and be a part of dedicating the memorial.

Doughty-Madsen, who died in 2022, had held onto a box that her mother saved. Inside were her siblings' tennis shoes, notebooks and comics — the contents of their desks and lockers at nearby Burroughs Elementary.

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