NROTC midshipmen attend civilian colleges during the fall and spring semesters, and spend part of the summer on active-duty training. The summer between their sophomore and junior years was dedicated to aviation and amphibious-warfare training. Half of the midshipmen started training with aviation and the other half started with amphibious-warfare training. After three weeks, a group of military transport aircraft airlifted the midshipmen to the other training location. Transport had been by train through 1952, and 1953 was the first summer during which midshipmen were airlifted between the training locations.[1]
The accident remains the greatest recorded loss of United States midshipmen in a single event.[4] The crash was the 19th operational loss of a R4Q / C-119 type aircraft. At the time, it was the heaviest loss of life from an accident with that type of aircraft, but two subsequent accidents had higher fatalities. When it occurred, it ranked as the eleventh highest fatality count for an aircraft accident in the United States.[5] Many of the Holloway Plan midshipmen were engineering students; and surviving midshipmen on other planes recalled one of those killed had completed an evaluation of the R4Q aircraft as an exercise and shared his conclusion that the aircraft could not maintain altitude if one engine failed during takeoff with a full load of fuel and cargo.[1] Loss of most of the University of Oklahoma NROTC graduating class of 1955 severely disrupted the NROTC program at that school. Students from all NROTC schools were uniformly distributed among transport aircraft in subsequent summer training programs.