- Buddy Holly
Charles Hardin Holley (September 7 1936 - February 3 1959), better known as Buddy Holly, was an American singer, songwriter, and a pioneer of rock and roll. The change of spelling of "Holley" to "Holly" came about because of an error in a contract he was asked to sign, listing him as Buddy Holly. That spelling was then adopted for his professional career. The original spelling of "Holley" was engraved on his headstone (see photo). - John Denver
John Denver (December 31, 1943 - October 12, 1997), born Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr., was an American folk singer-songwriter and folk rock musician who was one of the biggest selling artists of the 1970s. In his lifetime, he recorded and released some 300 songs, about half of which he had written, and served as the Poet Laureate of Colorado. Denver's songs were suffused with a deep and abiding kinship with the natural world. - John F. Kennedy Jr.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jr., often referred to as John F. Kennedy, Jr., JFK Jr., John Jr. or John-John, was an American lawyer, journalist, socialite and publisher. He was the son of President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and the younger brother of Caroline Kennedy (as well as of the deceased Arabella Kennedy and older brother of the deceased Patrick Bouvier Kennedy). - Cory Lidle
Cory Fulton Lidle was an American right-handed pitcher in Major League Baseball. He played for seven different teams in his nine-season career, last playing for the New York Yankees. Four days after the Yankees were eliminated from the 2006 postseason, the 34-year-old Lidle was killed when the small aircraft he owned crashed into a residential building in New York City. - Will Rogers
William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers (November 4, 1879 - August 15, 1935) was an American comedian, humorist, social commentator, vaudeville performer, and actor. He has been named Oklahoma's favorite son. - Ron Brown
Ronald Harmon Brown (August 1, 1941 - April 3, 1996), was the United States Secretary of Commerce, serving during the first term of President Bill Clinton. He was the first African American to hold this position. - Barbara Olson
Barbara Olson (December 27, 1955 - September 11, 2001) was a conservative American television commentator who worked for Fox News Channel, CNN and several other outlets. She was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 77 when it was flown into the Pentagon in the September 11, 2001 attacks. Olson was born Barbara Kay Bracher in Houston, Texas. - Payne Stewart
William Payne Stewart (January 30, 1957 - October 25, 1999), was an American golfer who won three majors in his career, the last of which occurred only months before he died in an airplane accident at the age of 42. Stewart was born in Springfield, Missouri, and attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, where he was a member of Phi Gamma Delta. He was always popular with fans, especially for his clothing, … - Aaliyah Dana Haughton
Aaliyah Dana Haughton (January 16, 1979 – August 25, 2001), best known as Aaliyah, was an American singer, dancer, model and actress. Introduced to audiences by R&B singer R. Kelly, Aaliyah became famous during the mid-1990s with several hit records from the songwriting/production team of Missy Elliott & Timbaland and their associate Steve "Static" Garrett. Aaliyah soon joined Timbaland's R&B and hip hop collective, the Superfriends Clique. - Mel Carnahan
Melvin Eugene "Mel" Carnahan was an American politician who was Governor of Missouri from 1993 to 2000. A Democrat, he died in a plane crash on the Pevely and Hillsboro, Missouri border during a campaign for the U.S. Senate, after which he was elected posthumously to the office. - Todd Beamer
Todd Morgan Beamer (November 24, 1968 - September 11, 2001) was a victim of the September 11, 2001 attacks. He was a passenger aboard United Airlines Flight 93. - Thurman Munson
Thurman Lee Munson was an American catcher in Major League Baseball who played with the New York Yankees from 1969 to 1979. Munson was killed at age 32 while trying to land his personal airplane. - Artyom Borovik
Artyom Borovik was a prominent Russian journalist and media magnate. He was the son of a Soviet-era journalist, Genrikh Borovik, who worked for many years as a foreign correspondent in the U.S. Artyom Borovik was a pioneer of investigative journalism in the Soviet Union during the beginning of glasnost. He worked for the American CBS program "60 Minutes" during the 1990s, and began publishing his own monthly investigative newspaper "Top Secret", … - Berry Berenson
Born Berinthia Berenson in New York in 1948, Berenson was a noted photographer and actress and was the sister of model-turned-actress Marisa Berenson (of "Barry Lyndon" fame). Berenson met her husband, actor and star of Alfred Hitchcock's original version of Psycho (1960), Anthony Perkins on the set of his film Play It As It Lays (1972) and married him in 1973. The couple raised 2 sons and remained married until Perkins' death of an AIDS-related illness in 1992. Listed on the flight... - Mickey Leland
George Thomas Leland, better known as Mickey Leland, was a spokesman for the hungry and poor, and later became a congressman from the Texas 18th District and chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. He was a Democrat. Born in Lubbock, Texas, Leland attended Wheatley High School in Houston, Texas and obtained a bachelor's and Doctorate of Pharmacy at Texas Southern University in Houston. - Ricky Hendrick
Joseph Riddick Hendrick IV, born in Charlotte, North Carolina, was a NASCAR driver and owner affiliated with his father Rick Hendrick's Hendrick Motorsports team. He died on a team flight to the race at Martinsville Speedway in Martinsville, Virginia along with his uncle, 2 cousins and six others. Ricky's fiancée, Emily Maynard, was pregnant with his child at the time of his death. His daughter, Josephine Riddick "Ricki" Hendrick, was born June 29, 2005. - Peter Tomarken
Peter David Tomarken was an American television personality known primarily as host of "Press Your Luck". Born in Olean, New York, Tomarken was the middle son of Barnet and Pearl Tomarken. Barnet and Pearl owned Dee’s Jewelry store in Olean. When Barnet died in 1957, Pearl moved the family to Odessa, Texas and then in 1959 to California. Peter was 15 at the time and later graduated from Beverly Hills High School in 1960. - Otis Redding
Otis Ray Redding, Jr. (September 9, 1941 - December 10, 1967) was an influential American deep soul singer, best known for his passionate delivery and posthumous hit single, "(Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay." According to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (where he was inducted in 1989) website, Redding's name is "synonymous with the term soul, music that arose out of the black experience in America through the transmutation of gospel and rhythm & blues into a form of funky, … - Patsy Cline
Patsy Cline was an American country music singer, who enjoyed pop music cross-over success during the era of the Nashville Sound in the early 1960s. Since her death at the age of 30 in a 1963 plane crash at the height of her career, she has been considered one of the most influential, successful, revered and acclaimed female vocalists of the 20th century. Her life and career has been the subject of numerous books, movies, documentaries, articles and stage plays. - Ritchie Valens
Richard Steven Valenzuela (May 13 1941 - February 3 1959), better known as Ritchie Valens, was a pioneer of rock and roll and was a Mexican-American with Yaqui American Indian roots born in the Pacoima district of Los Angeles . - Jessica Dubroff
Jessica Whitney Dubroff was a 7-year-old pilot trainee who was attempting to become the youngest person to fly an airplane across the United States when, 24 hours into her flight, her general aviation aircraft crashed after takeoff from Cheyenne Regional Airport in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Dubroff was born in Contra Costa, California. During her flight, which included several stopovers, Dubroff became an instant media celebrity. - Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy
Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, née Carolyn Jeanne Bessette, was the wife of John F. Kennedy, Jr., the son of assassinated U.S. President John F. Kennedy. She died aged 33, along with her husband and her sister Lauren Bessette, when the private plane that John F. Kennedy, Jr. himself was piloting crashed in the Atlantic Ocean near Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. Their ashes were scattered at sea on July 22, 1999. - Paul Wellstone
Paul David Wellstone was an American politician and two-term U.S. Senator from Minnesota. He was a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and was a professor of political science at Carleton College before being elected to the Senate in 1990. Wellstone was a liberal and a leading spokesman for the progressive wing of the national Democratic Party. He served in the Senate from 1991 until his death in a plane crash on 25 October, 2002, in the 102nd, 103rd, 104th, 105th, … - Ricky Nelson
Eric Hilliard "Ricky" Nelson, later known as Rick Nelson (May 8, 1940 -December 31, 1985), was one of the first American teen idols. - Roald Amundsen
Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen was a Norwegian explorer of polar regions. He led the first successful Antarctic expedition to the South Pole between 1910 and 1912. He disappeared in June 1928 while taking part in a rescue mission. With Douglas Mawson, Robert Falcon Scott, and Ernest Shackleton, Amundsen was a key expedition leader during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. - Bruce Geller
Bruce Geller was an American composer, screenwriter, and television producer. Born in New York City, New York, Geller graduated from Yale University. He pursued a career writing scripts for shows on the DuMont Television Network and others. He also wrote lyrics for musical theatre productions including "Livin' the Life " (1957) and "All in Love" (1961) but his efforts met with only modest success. - Homi J. Bhabha
Homi Jehangir Bhabha was an Indian nuclear physicist of Parsi-Zoroastrian heritage who had a major role in the development of the Indian atomic energy program and is considered to be the father of India's nuclear program. Bhabha was born in Bombay. He studied at the Elphinstone College and the Royal Institute of Science. He received his doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1934. - Jim Croce
James Joseph Croce, popularly known as Jim Croce (pronounced CRO-chee), was an American singer-songwriter. - Jacques Thibaud
Jacques Thibaud (September 27, 1880 - September 1, 1953) was a French violinist. Thibaud was born in Bordeaux and studied the violin first with his father before entering the Paris Conservatoire at the age of thirteen. In 1896 he jointly won the conservatoire's violin prize with Pierre Monteux (who later became a famous conductor). He was injured while fighting in World War I, after which he had to rebuild his technique. - René Cogny
René Cogny was a French Général de division, World War II veteran and later commander of the French forces in Tonkin, North Vietnam during the First Indochina War and notably the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. Known to his men as Le General Vitesse (General Hurry-Up), Cogny was killed when his Air France Caravelle jetliner crashed near Nice in the Mediterranean. - Tony Lema
Anthony David "Tony" Lema (February 25, 1934 - July 24, 1966) was an American professional golfer. Lema was born in Oakland, California to parents of Portuguese ancestry. His father died when Tony was three years old, and his widowed mother struggled to raise the family of four children on welfare. He began playing golf as a boy, but at age 17 enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and served in Korea. After his discharge from the military in 1955, … - Larry Hillblom
Larry Lee Hillblom (1943 - 1995) was a co-founder of DHL Worldwide Express, a shipping company. Larry Hillblom was a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law, and in 1969, co-founded DHL, which delivered shipping documents via air courier days before the ship arrived, so that the ships could be quickly unloaded. The company was later transformed into a general air courier, and Hillblom's wealth expanded to several billion dollars. - Bernt Carlsson
Bernt Wilmar Carlsson (born 1938 in Stockholm, Sweden) was UN Commissioner for Namibia. He died when Pan Am Flight 103 was destroyed over Lockerbie, Scotland on December 21, 1988. An editorial in "The Guardian" of December 23, 1988 reported: :"Two days before Christmas, two tides flow strongly. One - the greater tide - is the tide of peace. More nagging, bloody conflicts have been settled in 1988 than in any year since the end of the Second World War. - Roberto Clemente
Roberto Clemente Walker (August 18, 1934 - December 31, 1972) was a Major League Baseball right fielder and right-handed batter. He was elected to the Hall of Fame posthumously in 1973 as the first Hispanic American to be selected, and the only exception to the mandatory five-year post-retirement waiting period since it was instituted in 1954. Clemente was born in Carolina, Puerto Rico, the youngest of four children. He played 18 seasons in the majors from 1955 to 1972, … - Audie Murphy
Audie Leon Murphy was an American soldier in World War II, and later became a famous actor, in 44 American films, in addition to being a songwriter. In 27 months of combat action, Murphy became the most decorated United States combat soldier of World War II. He received the Medal of Honor, the U.S. military's highest award for valor, along with 32 additional U.S. medals, five from France, and one from Belgium. - John Tower
John Goodwin Tower (September 29, 1925 - April 5, 1991) was the first Republican United States senator from Texas since Reconstruction. He served from 1961 until his retirement in January 1985, after which time he was the chairman of the Reagan-appointed Tower Commission that investigated the Iran-Contra Affair. - Rick Tolley
Rickey D. Tolley was the head coach of the Marshall University Thundering Herd football team during the 1969 and 1970 seasons. He died in the 1970 plane crash that killed most of the Marshall football team and coaching staff. Tolley became the interim head coach of Marshall just 4 days before the start of fall practice for the 1969 season. He had just 32 players that first season yet still managed to win games against Bowling Green University (21-16), … - Lin Biao
Lin Biao (December 5, 1907 - September 13 1971 ?) was a Chinese Communist military leader that was instrumental in the communist victory in the Chinese Civil War. He rose to political prominence during the Cultural Revolution, climbing as high as second-in-charge and Mao Zedong's designated successor and comrade-in-arms, but after his death he was condemned as a traitor. - Carole Lombard
Carole Lombard (October 6, 1908 - January 16, 1942), born Jane Alice Peters in Fort Wayne, Indiana, was an Oscar-nominated American actress. She was particularly noted for her comedic roles in a number of classic films of the 1930s. - Garnet Bailey
Garnet Edward "Ace" Bailey, was a Canadian professional hockey player and scout who was a member of Stanley Cup and Memorial Cup winning teams. He died at age 53 in the crash of United Airlines Flight 175 into the World Trade Center in New York City, during the September 11, 2001 attacks.
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