On Sunday, December 19, 1976, the Pittsburgh Steelers finished routing the Baltimore Colts 40-14 in an AFC playoff game. About ten minutes later, a small blue-and-white Piper Cherokee dropped into Memorial Stadium. It skimmed the field, tried to climb out over the far end, stalled, and came down nose first in the upper deck.
More than 60,000 people had come to that game. Because the Colts were getting blown out, almost none of them were still sitting where the plane landed.
The pilot was Donald N. Kroner, 33, a Colts fan who liked to call himself the “Blue Max.” Twelve days earlier he had buzzed Pellington’s Iron Horse, a restaurant owned by former Colts linebacker Bill Pellington. He was still out on bond when he flew to the stadium.
No one died that afternoon, but a Baltimore police officer said years later that the plane hit him. The crash turns 50 on December 19, 2026.
A rout on 33rd Street
The game was the AFC divisional playoff at Memorial Stadium, the horseshoe on East 33rd Street that the Colts shared with the Orioles. The Associated Press put the crowd at 60,020.
Terry Bradshaw hit Frank Lewis for a 76-yard touchdown on the third play of the game. John Steadman, one of the Baltimore sportswriters on hand that day, wrote about it in The Sun 20 years later. The home crowd was so disappointed, he wrote, that it “began to vacate the premises as early as the third period.”
Two planes, one afternoon
Kroner didn’t just show up after the final whistle. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, he’d already been over the stadium during the game in a different plane. FAA spokesman Alex Garvis told United Press International the next day that Kroner first rented a Cessna 150 at Essex Sky Park.
Kroner buzzed the game in that one, Garvis said. “From all our information he buzzed the stadium and flew to the Alvino Airport, got out … and apparently rented another plane and that’s the one he crashed in.” That was probably Aldino, a small airfield in Churchville, since the National Transportation Safety Board lists the Cherokee’s operator as Aldino, Churchville.
William E. Fowler Jr. was the NTSB administrative law judge who heard the FAA’s case against Kroner in early 1977. At about 3 p.m., he found, the first plane, a maroon and white Cessna, made several passes over the stadium. It flew at less than 500 feet while many thousands of fans were inside.
Late that afternoon Kroner was back up in the second plane, and the Baltimore tower was talking to him. “When the pilot reported to the tower, he said he was flying at 2,000 feet over the stadium … en route to Bay Bridge,” Garvis said.
The tower told him to climb to 2,500 feet and gave him a heading for the Bay Bridge. “The next thing we knew he was in the stands,” Garvis said.
Into the upper deck
The Sun timed the end of the game at 4:59 p.m. and the crash at about 5:05, at dusk and under clear skies. Fowler found that Kroner made two low passes over the stadium at less than 100 feet, with several thousand people still inside. On the second pass he flew into the stands.
The Evening Sun, as The Sun quoted it in 1996, reported that Kroner came in low from the north, the open end of the horseshoe. He was “flying just over the scoreboard and the north goal post in what might have been an attempt to land on the playing field.” Then:
“The plane banked and climbed, clearing the upper deck railing by a few feet, began to turn right and then fell into the chair-back seats of Section 1 of the upper deck, behind where home plate would be located for baseball.”
Ben Roth, the stadium’s assistant superintendent, was on the field supervising a crew putting the tarp down. He told The Sun he looked up and yelled, “Hey, get out of the way. This guy’s coming in.”
Steadman wrote that the plane came down to about 10 feet off the ground at the 50-yard line. Then it suddenly accelerated and climbed right over two sportswriters standing in the end zone, one of them Dave Ailes of the Greensburg, Pennsylvania, Tribune-Review. “I can close my eyes right now and still see that plane coming at us,” Ailes told him 20 years later.
Yvon Tyler of Baltimore was in the stands. “The plane circled the field … and then came back into the stadium,” she told the AP.
“It tried to climb and it banked, but it couldn’t make it.” And then: “We couldn’t duck, we couldn’t run, we didn’t know what to do.”
Sportscaster Vince Bagli was heading down to the Colts’ dressing room. “I thought someone had rolled a garbage can down the ramp until I looked out and saw the plane sitting upstairs,” he recalled for The Sun.
The plane sheared off its left wing as it hit. The AP described the white plane with blue trim as having a broken wing and a twisted nose. Frederick N. Rasmussen, writing in The Sun in 1996, said fewer than 3,000 fans were still in the stands when it hit.
Who was hurt
The person hurt worst may have been a Baltimore police officer working the game, Joseph Sacco, 34, of the Southwestern District. The Sun reported the next morning that “a piece of flying debris hit Officer Joseph Sacco” in the left side. He was taken to Union Memorial Hospital, the paper said, “where he was treated and released.”
Officer David Williams, 29, of the Southern District, was the first policeman to reach the wreck. Fumes from the spilled fuel overcame him as he helped pull Kroner from the plane.
He was admitted to Union Memorial and discharged the next evening, the Sun reported. A third officer was treated for the fumes at the scene, and no fans were hurt.
The Sun said the section where the plane fell, which it called Section 41, was empty. A day later the paper put the wreck in “the upper section of the Stadium just above the baseball press box.” It gave no section number at all, so the Sun’s 41 and the Evening Sun’s Section 1 were never reconciled.
Sacco remembered it as worse. In 2016 he talked about that day with the York Daily Record. Afterward the fire and rescue news site Statter911 reported that the plane hit him.
Statter911 said he spent more than a month in the hospital and retired on disability about four years later. The 1976 papers don’t mention a long hospital stay.
The counts never matched. The AP said the pilot and three policemen were injured, while UPI said Kroner and two policemen, “none seriously.”
Fowler wrote that it was “extremely fortunate that no one, save the Respondent himself, was injured.” The NTSB’s own injury table is garbled, listing two “passengers” on a plane Kroner flew alone. Kroner himself was pulled from the wreck and taken to Union Memorial Hospital.
The Blue Max
Baltimore police Sgt. John Hucke testified at Kroner’s trial about what turned up in the cockpit. Police and firefighters found a roll of toilet paper, a can of yellow spray enamel, a can of spray snow and a note: “To Bert Jones, QB, from Blue Max. Good luck, you B-More Colts.”
Fowler also found that on December 7, 1976, Kroner flew a rented Cessna about 100 feet over Pellington’s Iron Horse. He placed the restaurant in Lutherville, though The Sun called it a Timonium restaurant.
The Sun reported in 1996 that Kroner had been thrown out of the place. He came back by air, the paper said, dropping rolls of toilet paper and a bottle on the roof.
Baltimore County police charged him with reckless flying and littering, among other charges, UPI reported. He was free on $2,100 bond when he flew to the stadium.
In the days before the game, according to Steadman and former Colts linebacker Stan White, he’d also buzzed a Colts practice. They said he dropped neckties out of his plane, too. The Sun reported that he had been fired as an MTA bus driver earlier that month.
His mail carrier, Ronald Ormrod, told the Sun that Kroner mentioned a stunt the afternoon before the game. “I sure didn’t take him seriously,” Ormrod said, “but he told me he was going to land the plane in the Stadium. He said, ‘I’m going to give them a Christmas present.'”
Maryland had banned flying below 3,000 feet over “any public or private sporting arena” since 1974. State Sen. John Carroll Byrnes told the AP that the law had never been enforced.
In court
On Wednesday, December 22, 1976, Kroner was taken from Union Memorial Hospital to the Northern police station and charged. He faced four counts: malicious destruction of property for the rented plane and for the stadium, reckless flying, and violating the law against flying over the stadium. He still wore “the blood-spattered orange shirt” he had on when he was pulled from the Cherokee, The Sun reported.
His attorney, Malcolm Houston, said the plane had engine trouble and the stadium was the only clear place to put it down.
Kroner put it his own way, according to UPI. “I may have made a mistake,” he said. He added that he should have put the plane down on 33rd Street “and wiped out the whole goddamn community.”
He said there were too many people on the infield to land there. “But I had the guts to land in the upper deck.” Guts is one word for it.
Judge Harold D. Lewis set bail at $25,000, down from the $40,000 a court commissioner had set. Kroner was sent to City Hospitals for a 72-hour psychiatric evaluation.
Kroner, the judge said, “might endanger the lives of others. I just can’t take that chance.”
The engine story didn’t hold up, because federal investigators said the plane was trouble-free. At the NTSB hearing on the FAA’s case, FAA maintenance inspector Raymond Meyers testified that he went over the Cherokee. He found no mechanical failure at all, and in his opinion the engine was running when the plane hit the stands.
On February 7, 1977, after a seven-hour trial with 15 prosecution witnesses, Judge Daniel Friedman found Kroner guilty. The verdict covered reckless flying and both counts of malicious destruction. Several witnesses testified that Kroner had promised them “a good halftime airshow,” the AP reported.
Friedman threw out the city charge for flying over the stadium, because that ordinance applied only to commercial advertising aircraft. Kroner had shown “wanton disregard for other people and for himself,” the judge said, according to The Sun.
His lawyer argued that engine trouble and broken glasses forced him down at the lighted stadium. But Garrett Minnick of Towson testified that Kroner had told him what to expect.
“I’ll be doing some aerobatics,” Kroner said. “Be sure to watch. It’ll be exciting.”
Later that month a Baltimore County judge in Towson gave Kroner 90 days for reckless flying and 30 days for littering over the Pellington flight. On March 15, 1977, Friedman sentenced him to two years on each malicious destruction count and 90 days for reckless flying, to run together. Kroner, jailed since December because he couldn’t make bail, spoke before he was sentenced.
“I don’t know what happened. I did not try to hurt anybody. I’ve never tried to hurt anybody. I sure didn’t try to kill myself. I’m just sorry it happened.”
“The court felt it was a planned thing,” Friedman said. “What was in Kroner’s mind, I’ll never know.” The Sun reported in 1996 that Kroner served three months of the two-year sentence.
The FAA went after his license, too. On December 21, two days after the crash, it issued an emergency order revoking it. It also sent an attorney from Washington to pick the license up, the Sun reported.
After a two-day hearing in early 1977, Fowler upheld the FAA’s emergency order revoking Kroner’s pilot certificate. He found the Cherokee flight “reckless” and spoke of Kroner’s “willful and almost incredible disregard of the safety of the general public” at the stadium.
“I cannot recall offhand a more ‘public crash’ than the one that occurred on December 19th. It is not too often you hear of an aircraft colliding with a stadium, an athletic stadium at that, and particularly when that stadium a few minutes before had been occupied by thousands of persons.”
The NTSB closed its investigation in July 1977. Its record describes an attempted landing in a football stadium after the game by a plane that couldn’t climb over the surrounding stands. Its coded probable cause was the pilot’s poor judgment and misjudged distance, speed, altitude or clearance.
How Baltimore remembers it
Ben Roth told The Sun in 1996 that about a year after the crash, he got a letter from Kroner. It apologized for any damage to the stadium and asked for help getting Colts season tickets, with a check enclosed. Kroner died in 2013, Statter911 reported.
Gov. Marvin Mandel was at the stadium that day. “Thank God it happened when it did,” he told The Sun. “It could have been a terrible tragedy.”
The players came to the same conclusion. “Looking back, that whipping was probably a godsend,” former Colts running back Lydell Mitchell told The Sun in 1996.
“It saved a lot of lives. Our fans probably would have still been in the stands if it had been a close game.”
Steadman wrote that the picture of the plane in the stands ran on front pages around the world. The Colts left for Indianapolis in 1984, and Memorial Stadium is gone, but the story kept coming back. Writing in 1996, Steadman put it this way: “Anytime Pittsburgh and Baltimore meet, it’s occasion to replay the Donald Kroner Air Show.”
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