Eastern Air Lines Flight 663 was a domestic passenger flight from Boston, Massachusetts, to Atlanta, Georgia, with scheduled stopovers at John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York; Richmond, Virginia; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Greenville, South Carolina. On the night of February 8, 1965, the aircraft serving the flight, a Douglas DC-7, crashed near Jones Beach State Park, New York, just after taking off from JFK Airport. All 79 passengers and five crew aboard perished. The Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) investigation determined that evasive maneuvers undertaken by Flight 663 to avoid an oncoming Pan Am Boeing 707 caused the pilot to suffer spatial disorientation and lose control of the aircraft. The accident is the third-worst accident involving a DC-7. Flight history The Douglas DC-7 serving Flight 663 made its first flight in 1958 and subsequently accumulated a total of 18,500 hours of flight time. It was piloted by Captain Frederick R. Carson, 41, who had been employed by Eastern Air Lines for 19 years and who had accumulated 12,607 hours of flight time. His co-pilot, First Officer Edward R. Dunn, 41, a nine-year veteran of Eastern Airlines, had 8,550 hours of flight time. The flight engineer was Douglas C. Mitchell, 24, with two years' employment and 407 pilot hours, and 141 hours of flight engineer time. All had passed proficiency checks with the DC-7B aircraft. The flight from Logan International Airport in Boston, Massachusetts, to John F. Kennedy International Airport, in New York, proceeded normally. Flight 663 departed JFK at 6:20 p.m. EST on an instrument flight rules (IFR) clearance to Byrd Field (now Richmond International Airport), in Richmond, Virginia. Take-off proceeded normally, and the airport control tower prepared to hand over control to the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) on Long Island, noting that Flight 663 was executing a "Dutch seven departure", a routine takeoff procedure that required a series of turns over the Atlantic Ocean to avoid flying over New York City. The New York ARTCC responded with the information that Pan American World Airways (PA) Flight 212, a Boeing 707, was descending to in the same airspace. Though the control tower responded that EA 663 was at a higher altitude than PA 212, it was, in fact, lower. Subsequently, the control tower radioed the Pan Am flight that there was traffic in his airspace at 11 o'clock, six miles away traveling southeast of Pan Am's