The air traffic controllers in Newark's tower watched it happen. The DC-6 — a four-engined propeller aircraft — departed at 00:18 EST and almost immediately began losing altitude, veering right. Two minutes is not much time. The plane clipped an apartment building on its way down, the collision setting the structure ablaze before the aircraft continued its trajectory to the ground and burst into flames. The crash site in Elizabeth was close to both residential buildings and an orphanage — proximity that shaped the public response in the days and weeks that followed. How close it came to killing even more people was a measure of how serious the situation had become.

Flight 101 was not Elizabeth's first disaster that winter. In December 1951, a Miami Airlines C-46 had gone down over the city. Three weeks before Flight 101 fell, an American Airlines Convair 240 had crashed there as well. Three crashes, three incidents of flaming metal descending onto a densely populated urban area, in less than sixty days. The accumulation of disaster produced something beyond grief — it produced a crisis of public confidence. If Newark Airport was the common thread, then Newark Airport had to answer for what had happened. The pressure was intense and it translated directly into policy: the airport was shut down, and a nationwide review of airport safety procedures was launched.

Newark Airport reopened on November 15, 1952, nearly nine months after Flight 101. The investigations that preceded the reopening concluded that the airport's facilities were not at fault in the crashes — the proximity of residential areas to the approach and departure corridors, rather than any deficiency in the airport itself, was the underlying problem. That finding resolved the legal questions without resolving the human ones. Elizabeth residents had watched three planes fall out of the sky over their neighborhood. The investigations confirmed the crashes were tragedies, not systemic failures. The airport came back. The people who lived beneath those flight paths had to decide for themselves what that meant.

Judy Blume grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey. She was thirteen years old during the winter of 1951-52, old enough to feel the weight of what had happened, young enough for the experience to lodge permanently in memory. More than sixty years later, she turned the three crashes into the subject of her 2015 adult novel, In the Unlikely Event — a title that carries its own dark irony, the phrase airline safety cards use to suggest that catastrophe is something that almost never happens. For Elizabeth residents of that era, the unlikely event had happened three times in quick succession. Blume's novel gave those crashes a narrative frame and gave the city's memory a wider audience, reaching readers who had never heard of Elizabeth or its terrible winter.