The businessman-pilot took off at 3:15 in the afternoon from St. Petersburg, Florida, in his company’s A36 Bonanza, bound for Norman, Oklahoma. He filed IFR, with a cruising altitude of 10,000 feet and a speed of 185 knots. The 900 nm trip would have been at the very limit of the airplane’s range, but he was evidently counting on a tailwind.
He followed Florida’s western shore to the north-northwest until it, and he, bent westward. Skirting the southern edge of a line of convective weather in the Florida Panhandle and southern Alabama, he encountered in Mississippi a more formidable obstacle: a squall line that extended, practically unbroken, all the way from the Gulf of Mexico to Chicago.
