^
Deaths
which occurred on a 28 January:
2002
All 9 crew members and 83 passengers, including 7 children, onboard
TAME airlines flight 120, a Boeing
727-134 which had left Quito at 10:03 and crashes at 10:23 into the
4775-meter-high Chiles Volcano (near Ipiales, Colombia) as it circles in
approach to its destination, Tulcán, at the Colombia-Ecuador border.
2002 Six al-Qaida fighters, who refuse to surrender and
are killed by Afghan troops and US special forces soldiers in a 04:00 to
12:00 assault on the second floor of the Mir Wail hospital in Kandahar,
Afghanistan, which the al-:Qaida fighters had transformed into a fortress
after being left there, sick or wounded but heavily armed, by the retreating
Taliban two months earlier. [It is not explained why they were allowed food
and water during their 2-month defiance].
2001 Naina
Badrasen, after surviving 50 hours under earthquake rubble in Ghuj, Gujarat,
while Indian Air Force personnel and policemen frantically try to free her.
They do manage to pull out alive her year-and half-old daughter Namrata,
whose faint sobbing had alerted them to the location.
2001
José María Sánchez Casas, activista político español, fundador
de los Grupos de Resistencia Antifascista Primero de Octubre (GRAPO).
1996 U San Yu, 77, soldier/politician, President of Burma
in 1981-88
1996 Jerry Seigel, 81, writer who, with
artist friend Joe Shuster, in the 1930s created the character Superman.
1989 The Panchen Lama.
^
1986 16:39 UT ^
Sharon Christa McAuliffe , 37,
astronaut/teacher, in Challenger disaster, together
with Francis
R. Scobee, 46, (the commander), Michael
J. Smith, 40,(the pilot, last voice heard as communications
go dead: "Uhoh!"), Judith
A. Resnik, 36, Ellison
S. Onizuka, 39, Ronald
E. McNair, 35, and ^
Gregory B. Jarvis, 41, as 25th
Space Shuttle (51L)-Challenger
10 explodes 73 seconds after liftoff. A presidential commission
appointed to investigate the accident later determined that the explosion
was caused by faulty O-ring gaskets.
At
11:38 EST, the space shuttle Challenger lifts off from Cape Canaveral,
Florida, and Christa McAuliffe is on her way to becoming the first
ordinary US civilian to travel into space. McAuliffe, a high school
social studies teacher from New Hampshire, won a competition that
earned her a place among the seven-member crew of the Challenger.
She underwent months of shuttle training but then, beginning on 23
January was forced to wait six long days as the Challenger's launch
countdown was repeatedly delayed because of weather and technical
problems.
Finally, on 28 January
the shuttle lifted off more than two-and-one-half hours after the
astronauts took their seats inside. Seventy-three seconds later, hundreds
on the ground, including Christa's family, stared in disbelief as
the shuttle exploded in a forking plume of smoke and fire. Millions
more watched the wrenching tragedy unfold on live television. There
were no survivors. In 1976, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA) unveiled the world's first reusable manned spacecraft, the
Enterprise. Five years later, space flights of the shuttle began when
Columbia traveled into space on a 54-hour mission. Launched by two
solid-rocket boosters and an external tank, only the aircraft-like
shuttle entered into orbit around Earth. When the mission was completed,
the shuttle fired engines to reduce speed and, after descending through
the atmosphere, landed like a glider.
Early shuttles took satellite equipment into space and carried out
various scientific experiments. The Challenger disaster was the first
major shuttle accident. In the aftermath of the explosion, President
Ronald Reagan appointed a special commission to determine what went
wrong with Challenger and to develop future corrective measures. The
presidential commission was headed by former secretary of state William
Rogers, and included former astronaut Neil Armstrong and former test
pilot Chuck Yeager. The investigation determined that the explosion
was caused by the failure of an "O-ring" seal in one of the two solid-fuel
rockets. The elastic O-ring did not respond as expected because of
the cold temperature at launch time, which began a chain of events
that resulted in the massive explosion. As a result of the explosion,
NASA did not send astronauts into space for more than two years as
it redesigned a number of features of the space shuttle. In September
1988, space shuttle flights resumed with the successful launching
of the Enterprise. Since then, the space shuttle has carried out numerous
important missions, such as the repair and maintenance of the Hubble
Space Telescope and the construction of the International Space Station.
By the end of the 20th century, there would have been more than 100
space shuttle flights. |
1985 Pars,
mathematician.
1975 Antonin Novótny, 70, Czechoslovakian
President (1957-68)
^
1964 Three US airmen in jet shot down by Soviets
over East Germany.
The US State
Department angrily accuses the Soviet Union of shooting down an American
jet that strayed into East German airspace. Three US officers aboard
the plane were killed in the incident. The Soviets responded with
charges that the flight was a "gross provocation," and the incident
was an ugly reminder of the heightened East-West tensions of the Cold
War era. According to the US military, the jet was on a training flight
over West Germany and pilots became disoriented by a violent storm
that led the plane to veer nearly 100 miles off course. The Soviet
attack on the plane provoked angry protests from the Department of
State and various congressional leaders, including Senator Hubert
H. Humphrey, who charged that the Soviets had intentionally downed
the plane "to gain the offensive" in the aggressive Cold War maneuvering.
For their part, the Soviets refused to accept US protests and responded
that they had "all grounds to believe that this was not an error or
mistake...It was a clear intrusion." Soviet officials also claimed
that the plane was ordered to land but refused the instructions. Shortly
after the incident, US officials were allowed to travel to East Germany
to recover the bodies and the wreckage. Like numerous other similar
Cold War incidents — including the arrest of suspected "spies"
and the seizure of ships — this event resulted in heated verbal
exchanges between the United States and the Soviet Union, but little
else. Both nations had bigger issues to contend with: the United States
was engaged in the Vietnam War, and the Soviet Union was dealing with
a widening split with communist China. The deaths were, however, another
reminder that the heated suspicion, heightened tension, and loaded
rhetoric of the Cold War did have the potential to erupt into meaningless
death and destruction. |
1963 Jean Felix Piccard, on his 79th birthday, Swiss explorer.
1963 Eight persons as a Continental Airlines Vickers Viscount
812 crashes on landing at Kansas City.
1958 Marion and Velda
Fugate, by shotgun, Betty Jean Fugate, 2, choked, by Charles Starkweather,
lover of the Fugates other daughter, Caril Ann, 14, who watches, in Lincoln,
Nebraska. Fleeing a couple of days later, the pair kills another 7 persons,
including in Nebraska wealthy businessman, C. Lauer Ward, his wife, Clara,
and their maid, Lillian Fenci, and in Wyoming salesman Merle Collison. Starkweather
would go to the electric chair on 24 June 24 1959. Caril Ann Fugate would
receive a life sentence.
1954 Esclangon, mathematician.
1946 Sintsov, mathematician. |
On
a January 28: 
A little boy who lost his mom in a shipwreck and was
lost at sea himself. 
