Wilkerson suffered a double fracture to his left leg, a double compound fracture to his left arm, six broken ribs, one of which punctured his left lung, and severe facial damage, losing 15 teeth. Despite breaking both arms, legs, wrists and ankles, as well as his pelvis, Rossington recovered from his injuries and still plays guitar with the reincarnated version of the band. When he woke up, he was on the ground with the plane's door on top of him. Rossington was knocked unconscious in the crash. He died four years later of chronic pneumonia – a complication of the paralysis. He eventually recovered but became paralyzed from the waist down after a 1986 crash that claimed the life of his girlfriend. "The smell of death surrounds you." - lyric as sung by Ronnie Van Zant in "That Smell"Ĭollins broke two vertebrae in his neck and suffered severe damage to his right arm, which he refused to have amputated. The crash took the lives of lead singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines and backup singer Cassie Gaines. in a wooded area near Gillsburg, Mississippi. After the pilot and co-pilot determined that the plane didn't have enough fuel to land at a nearby airport, they unsuccessfully attempted an emergency landing and crashed a few minutes before 7 p.m. Near the end of the flight, the twin-engine Convair CV-240 ran out of fuel. 20, 1977, the Jacksonville, Florida-based band left Greenville, South Carolina, after a concert at the Greenville Memorial Auditorium, and boarded a chartered plane en route to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where they were scheduled to perform the next night at Louisiana State University. "I think about it every day," one of the last living original members of the band on that fateful flight in 1977 recalled to Forbes earlier this week. Forty-five years to the day after a plane crash claimed the lives of three members of southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd, Artimus Pyle remembers the tragedy like it was yesterday. “We want vectors to McComb poste-haste please, sir.” Approximately 13 minutes later, however, the plane crashed just outside of Gillsburg, Mississippi.JACKSONVILLE, Fla. “We’re low on fuel and we’re just about out of it,” the pilot told Houston Center at approximately 6:42 pm. The plane’s crew, whom the National Transportation Safety Board would hold responsible for the mishap in the accident report issued eight months later, radioed Houston air-traffic control as the plane lost altitude, asking for directions to the nearest airfield. Three days later, however, tragedy struck the group when their chartered Convair 240 began to run out of fuel at 6,000 feet en route to Baton Rouge. On October 17, 1977, Lynyrd Skynyrd released their fifth studio album, Street Survivors, which would eventually be certified double-platinum. The newly renamed band scored a major hit with their hard-driving debut album (pronounced ‘lĕh-‘nérd ‘skin-‘nérd) (1973), which featured one of the most familiar and joked-about rock anthems of all time, “Free Bird.” Their follow-up album, Second Helping (1974), included the even bigger hit “Sweet Home Alabama,” and it secured the band’s status as giants of the southern rock subgenre. Under that name and several others, the group developed its chops playing local and regional gigs throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, then finally broke out nationally in 1973 following the adoption of the name “Lynyrd Skynyrd” in honor of a high school gym teacher/nemesis named Leonard Skinner. The original core of Lynyrd Skynyrd-Ronnie Van Zant, Bob Burns, Gary Rossington, Allen Collins and Larry Junstrom-first came together under the name “My Backyard” back in 1964, as Jacksonville, Florida, teenagers.
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