The Daughter of Flight 242′s Copilot Finally Speaks Out

By Clifford Davids

To say that Lyman W. Keele, Jr. was a competent pilot would be a major understatement. After graduating from the University of Nevada in 1966, he joined the Navy and received his flight training at the Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida. He was then stationed aboard the USS Hancock, where he flew over 100 combat missions against enemy targets in North Vietnam while also providing air support for ground forces and rescue operations. He received numerous bronze and gold Air Medals for outstanding aerial prowess, as well as a Navy Commendation for “heroic achievement as a pilot of jet aircraft while attached to Attack Squadron 212 on the USS Hancock.” The man could flat-out fly a plane.

Keele left the Navy and joined Southern Airways sometime in 1973. Although he was the copilot on Flight 242, he was the one at the controls on the leg from Huntsville to Atlanta when it went down in New Hope, GA on April 4, 1977, killing 72 people. He reportedly died upon impact, leaving behind his wife Kathleen and their two young daughters: seven-year-old Tiffany and two-year-old Monica. He had moved his wife and daughters to College Park, GA when he took the pilot job with Southern, but his family hailed from Rolling Hills in Southern California–afterwards they buried him nearby in the community of San Pedro. He was 34.

I was contacted by a man named Thad Morrison after I started this project in March of 2013. A decade ago he had been involved in planning a memorial to the crash victims, and he shared some valuable information with me, including the National Transportation Safety Board crash site map, several eyewitness statements, and his correspondence with Tiffany Keele Grana, Lyman Keele’s eldest daughter. The letters were a fascinating read.

She talked about how her parents first met on vacation in Catalina Island (26 miles off the coast of California) when her mom was 13 and he was 15. They dated through high school and college. After he graduated they got married and Lyman went into the Navy–they moved regularly from base to base when Tiffany was little. He did two tours in Vietnam, and she recalls her mother being so worried about his safety that she would suffer splitting migraine headaches. He was a “life of the party kind of guy” who was handsome and fun  and a great dad. He loved to surf the California waves and ride horses in his spare time.

So I dropped her a line, and she responded immediately. She wanted to know how she could help with the fundraising for the Flight 242 Memorial, and I asked her to write a letter to the people of New Hope and Paulding County about her life after the plane crash. I received her response the next day–and present it to you below in its entirety:

“YOUR DAD WENT TO FLY PLANES IN HEAVEN…”

By Tiffany Keele Grana

I will never forget those eight words. It was what the pastor’s wife told me on that windy and rainy night when I was sent to stay at our neighbor’s house because my mom had to leave so quickly…. I don’t really remember seeing my mom for a while after she left that night. I do remember I went to school the next day. It was an odd day because I was no longer just Tiffany–I was the girl whose father had just died.

Kids kept coming up to me asking if it was true. “Your dad died in a plane crash, and he was flying the plane?”

“But it wasn’t his fault,” I told them.

“Well he was the one flying the plane, so whose fault was it?” they asked.

So–at seven years old it was a bit easier to just drop that subject. It’s what families and adults did back in the 1970’s when they dealt with death. Thank goodness that’s not the case now. Now we use special words that help young children move on and process their grief. I wish someone had used some of those special words with me back then.

I waited every day for years for my dad to come back from the airport after his “layover” (that’s what he called it when he was gone). He would take me to McDonalds at 8 A.M. to get a cheeseburger because his days and nights were flipped. I cherish those moments. I hold on to every memory and every photo I can get my hands on. I remember him flying over our house in a small plane he rented for the day–I waited in the driveway all morning for him to do the flyover. I also remember once he flew us in a seaplane to Catalina, the small island off the coast of Southern California, because that was the place where my parents first met.

His father was also an aviator. My grandfather was a pilot for TWA–back when flying was done in style. He was tragically killed in an helicopter accident in Texas. My dad used to proclaim, “All of the Keele’s get a pilot’s license issued with their birth certificate!”

Back in high school my dad and his brother would fly to NYC or Paris for 3 days because the flight was as exciting as the destination itself. They took every moment they could to go up in the air. He always told us how safe air travel was and that sixty planes take off and land every second.

The irony about the Southern Airways crash was that my mother was always extremely worried about Lyman and his combat tours in Vietnam. The tours were always very stressful for her—it was the constant thought of him being taken prisoner or blown out of the sky. I remember he tried to reassure her by saying, “I have it easy–the Marines are on the ground getting shot at, I’m just up in the sky doing my thing–and I do it well!”

Landing a fighter plane on an aircraft carrier (my dad was on the USS Hancock) is one of the hardest things to do in aviation–tougher than being in a dogfight with another plane. So after the war was over, my mom told me she was relieved and thrilled that my dad was flying with a commercial airline–how ironic! Flying was always his first love, and now it had become his day job….so life was good.

All of my Dad’s friends told me he was the most talented pilot they knew – and coming from his peers (who were also pilots) that meant a lot. I didn’t know much about the crash until about three years ago, and that was also when I started to process my grief. How can that be that it took me so long?

Well, if you stuff it down for 30 years, at some point it will bubble back up. I saw a movie with a “father/daughter” theme in 1998, and I became hysterical, inconsolable, intensely crying, and in a complete fit because it hit so close to home. I knew at the time that I should address my grief, but I just wasn’t able to do it.

I remember my mom asking me when I was headed off to USC if I needed some grief counseling because that is what people did in those days, and I said, “NO. I’m fine–its been 10 years…” She apologized for not getting me counseling when I was younger, but it just wasn’t done then.

It was when my oldest son Trent Lyman wanted to know about his grandfather and namesake that I decided to read a few articles about Flight 242. I learned that there were four “on the ground” errors that lead to the crash:

(1) There was no up to the minute weather service via fax–Delta and Eastern had that but not Southern; (2) The phone line into the back up weather service was busy, so they made a judgment call to send up Flight 242; (3) The loss of both engines was unprecedented, so they told the pilots to throttle up–NOT to throttle down. Throttling down would have cleared out the hail and allowed a restart; and (4) They were not given a vector for a safe place to land by the air traffic controller–and there WAS a vector within the distance they were able to coast the plane once they lost the engines.

So on the afternoon of April 4, 1977, during two record storms, my dad’s plane crashed on that highway in New Hope, GA, and changed that community forever.

In April of 2011 I finally got some grief counseling. I finally realized that I had never cried about the loss of my father until I was sitting in a therapist’s office. Yep, over 30 years and I never shed one tear. When a parent dies, the appropriate word to use with children is either death or died or dead–to say “passed away” isn’t final and doesn’t help the child to adjust. Grief for kids five to eight years old manifests itself in denial–I only heard, “Your dad went to fly planes in heaven…” My seven-year-old self waited quite a while for him to return so we could go to McDonalds for that cheeseburger.

To this day my charity affiliation is with Grief Counseling. I am involved with Camp Erin–a camp where kids who have lost a parent or sibling can go for a weekend of fun and healing. Grief shapes people, and I must admit it shaped me. Until I got the help I needed, I was a little colder, a little more aloof, and a little more distant from everyone.

I was always very uncomfortable when any type of plane crash made the headlines. I would even take the day off from work—I was never at ease with the topic. The way we handle and deal with grief today has changed, and I sincerely pray that the people of the New Hope community and Paulding County were able to process their grief and move forward too.

I am certain my dad used the best tools he had available at the time to safely land that plane and avoid injuring those on the ground. He was a skilled pilot, talented and precise. I am so sorry for the impact the crash had on your community.

I just want to say thank you to everybody there–thank you for pulling together that day, and for doing such an amazing job afterwards. I know my dad thanks you too.

–Tiffany Keele Grana (April 2013)

Related Douglasville Patch stories:

A Forgotten Hero of Southern Airways Flight 242: Fire Chief John Clayton

Remembering Georgia's Worst-Ever Plane Crash

Visit the Flight 242 Traveling Display

Old Wounds Still Fresh as Plane Crash Anniversary Looms