page_title: United Airlines Flight 736
section_title: Investigations
hierarchical_section_title: United Airlines Flight 736 / Investigations
caption_attribution_description: North American F-100D Cockpit
context_page_description: United Airlines Flight 736 was a daily transcontinental passenger flight in the United States operated by United Airlines. On April 21, 1958, the Douglas DC-7 serving the flight crashed in southern Nevada following a mid-air collision. The aircraft assigned to Flight 736, an airliner with 47 aboard, was flying at cruise altitude above Clark County, en route to a stopover at Denver, Colorado, when it was struck by a United States Air Force fighter jet crewed by two pilots. The collision occurred at 8:30 a.m. in clear weather within a major commercial airway; both aircraft fell out of control from 21,000 feet and crashed into unpopulated desert terrain southwest of Las Vegas.
  There were no survivors from either aircraft, and with 49 fatalities it remains the deadliest crash in the history of the Las Vegas Valley. Among the victims were a group of military personnel and civilian contractors involved with sensitive Department of Defense weapons systems. The loss of the group triggered new rules prohibiting similar groups engaged in critical projects from flying aboard the same aircraft.
context_section_description: At the request of the local sheriff and United Airlines, the Federal Bureau of Investigation sent fingerprint experts to help identify the human remains. The Los Angeles Times reported that among the dead were 13 civilian and military managers, engineers and technicians assigned to the American ballistic missile program.  Articles in the Las Vegas Review-Journal commemorating the 40th and 50th anniversaries of the crash reported that the FBI search went beyond fingerprint matching for identification; the agents were also looking for any surviving sensitive papers relating to national security that the group of military contractors had carried on board in handcuffed briefcases. The same reports also said the crash prompted the military and defense industry to adopt rules to keep groups of technical people involved in the same critical project from traveling together on the same plane.
  The Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) conducted an investigation and published a report on the accident. The CAB ruled out the weather conditions and the airworthiness of the two planes as factors in the collision. The report stated the probable cause was the high rate of near head-on closure, and that at high altitude, there were human and cockpit limitations involved. Analysis of the approach angles concluded that a metal frame support on the F-100's canopy "interfered seriously" with detection of the DC-7, and a supporting pillar on the DC-7's windshield may have hindered sighting the fighter.  The CAB accident report also cited a failure of Nellis Air Force Base and the CAA to take measures to reduce a known collision exposure; training exercises were allowed to be conducted for more than a year prior to the collision within the confines of several airways, even after numerous near-misses with military jets had been reported by airline crews.
caption: An F-100 cockpit showing the metal canopy supports believed to have "interfered seriously" with seeing the DC-7.
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