On This Day – 6th February
6th February 1958 was one of the darkest days in English football.
A little after 3pm at Munich-Reim Airport, the aeroplane carrying the Manchester United party, crashed off the end of the runway, killing 23 people on board. Eight of the deceased were part of the Manchester United team.
The pilot had already tried twice to take-off but abandoned the attempt both times. On the third attempt to get airborne, snow was falling and conditions were worsening. The plane hit a build-up of slush at the end of the runway. This caused the plane to crash through a fence and the left wing was torn off after hitting a house.
United were a fantastic up-and-coming team who had won the League championship the season before and narrowly lost the FA Cup Final to Aston Villa in the same season. They had many great players in the team including Bobby Charlton, Duncan Edwards and Tommy Taylor and manager Matt Busby clearly had a team that could dominate for years to come.
The plane was flying back from Belgrade where United had been playing in a European Cup tie. The game was against Partizan Belgrade and had finished 3-3, meaning that United would go through to the Semi-Finals for the second successive season.
In United’s last league game before flying out to play Partizan, they won 5-4 away at Arsenal in a fantastic match. It was the last time that the team would be seen in England.
The United team were referred to as the ‘Busby Babes’ as they were such a young team, with an average age of 23 years. Sadly, the team were cut short and never had the full chance to show the world how good they would actually become.
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