MANCHESTER, England — Bobby Charlton recalls the worried silence of his teammates as the plane roared down the snowy runway for a third time.
Kenny Morgans remembers being hurled backward into the luggage compartment when the plane hit a fence.
Albert Scanlon doesn’t recall the crash at all. When he woke in the hospital, he didn’t know seven of his Manchester United teammates were dead.
For these and other survivors of the Feb. 6, 1958, Munich air crash that killed 23 people and took away the heart of the so-called Busby Babes, the 50th anniversary of one of soccer’s worst tragedies is more than simply remembering lost teammates.
"I’m now 72," said Scanlon, a winger who fractured his skull, broke a leg and shoulder, and damaged his kidney that day. "For 50 years I’ve gone around with this. The hardest part of my life since the air crash is meeting relations.
"I hate meeting families. I used to meet Eddie Colman’s dad and I always had the feeling he’d look at me and he’d be thinking, ‘Why is he (standing) there and my lad’s dead?"’
Colman was one of Scanlon’s seven teammates who were pronounced dead at the scene of the crash at Munich Airport. The others were Tommy Taylor, Roger Byrne, David Pegg, Liam Whelan, Geoff Bent and Mark Jones. Duncan Edwards, considered the best of them all at age 21, died in a hospital 15 days later. The 15 other fatalities included eight reporters.
To mark the anniversary on Wednesday, the team’s five living crash survivors — manager Matt Busby and four others have died over the years — will join current Manchester United players and the families of the players who died in a memorial service at Old Trafford.
Four days later, when United faces neighbour Manchester City in a Premier League match at Old Trafford, there will be a minute’s silence to honour the dead. Both sides will wear special shirts, with the United players donning the style worn by the 1958 team.
While the Munich crash was a tragedy for the families of those who died, it also robbed soccer of a team that seemed destined for greatness.
The young squad looked capable of matching star-studded Real Madrid, which had already won the first two European Cups, beating United in a 1957 semifinal.
Busby knew that his young stars were a year older and stronger this time. Charlton believed that, if Munich hadn’t happened, the team had the players to win the European title.
"Manchester United could have won it in 1958. But there was no Duncan Edwards, no Tommy Taylor, no Roger Byrne. No David Pegg," Charlton said. "So it was just such a massive tragedy. It was so bad because the team were so good."
Busby, who was twice given the last rites in the Munich hospital, recovered to rebuild the team. The likes of George Best and Denis Law teamed up with Charlton in a standout strike force and the Red Devils realized Busby’s dream by winning the European Cup in 1968.
Today, Manchester United is right up there with Real Madrid and the other giants of European soccer. Under Alex Ferguson, the Red Devils have won nine Premier League titles in 15 years, and the club’s five FA Cup titles under the Scot have taken it to a record 11. United also picked up the European Cup — now called the Champions League — in 1999.
"What we see today has all its foundation from back in those days, particularly the way it was done with young players," Ferguson said. "It brought a great deal of sympathy at the time and, from then on, the romance was built purely because of the way Matt rebuilt the team and won the European Cup in ’68 and did it the right way.
"That’s created the romance of what we see today, the affection around the world because the club has always played the right way with entertaining, attacking footballers."
It was this sort of dominance that Busby was hoping for back in the ’50s. Charlton has been involved throughout, first as a player and recently as a club director.
Though he was only 18 at the time of the crash, Charlton had played 32 times for the Red Devils and scored nine goals in his previous five appearances. That included two goals in the 3-3 draw at Red Star Belgrade, the game the team was returning from when the disaster occurred.
The plane stopped in Munich on the way home to refuel but heavy snow made the runway slushy and ice was forming on the wings. The pilot aborted two attempts to take off, and there was another delay for discussions about a third try.
In those days, the Football League dominated English soccer and regarded the European Cup as something of a sideshow. It had given United a deadline to get back home to prepare for its next domestic game two days later, so the decision was made to go for a third attempt at a takeoff.
Charlton said the players were concerned as the plane went down the runway with no sign that it was leaving the ground.
"I was conscious of the quiet on the plane. As we went through a fence and collided with a house, I didn’t hear the semblance of a scream," he said. "There had been just a vast and empty silence in the plane. The last thing I remember was the terrible rending noise of metal upon metal."