Did you know how many CEOs of oil, chemical and plastic companies died in a plane crash?
Willard Henry Dow — President / CEO of Dow Chemical (1949)
On March 31, 1949, Willard Dow, his wife Martha; Dow Counsel Calvin Campbell and his wife Alta; and veteran Dow Pilots Frederick Clement and Arthur Bowie took off from Freeland’s Tri-City Airport in a twin-engine Beechcraft owned by Dow Chemical.
They were flying to Boston to attend the Mid-Century Chemical Engineering Exposition, hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Winston Churchill was scheduled to speak there, and Dow had always wanted to meet him.
An hour after takeoff the airplane was nearing London, Ontario when they experienced freezing rain and the wings began to accumulate ice. The defrosters were not working, so the pilots descended hoping for warmer air, but loss of lift caused the plane to crash.
Source – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Dow
Enrico Mattei – First chairman ENI (1962)
ENI’s first chairman, Enrico Mattei’s, was assassinated in 1962. His small airplane was taken down on his way to Milan (IT) from Catania (Sicily).
Mattei negotiated oil concessions in the Middle East, made trade agreements with the Soviet Union and broke the oligopoly of the major oil companies of that time.
He referred to them as the seven sisters, a term that stayed: Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (became BP), Gulf Oil (became Chevron), Royal Dutch Shell, Standard Oil Company of California (became Chevron), Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (became Esso ->Exxon ->ExxonMobil), Standard Oil Company of New York (became Mobil ->ExxonMobil) and Texaco (merged with Chevron).
Joe Kuehn – Plastic Ingenuity Inc (1995)
Joe Kuehn was killed on 20 Sep 1995 when a single-engine seaplane crashed on a Canadian lake.
Fred Kremer Jr – Chairman, Hancor, Inc. (1997)
Fred was killed in a small-plane crash near Findlay, OH. The fog that blanketed the Findlay area was at its thickest around flight time.
Source – https://clipfile.org/1997/12/21/plane-crash-near-findlay-kills-3/
Daniel J. Edwards — President Mid-States Plastic Co. (2002)
Mid-States Plastic Co. President Daniel J. Edwards died in an Oct. 15 plane crash in Montgomery County, Ky.
Edwards was piloting a Cessna 172 when the plane clipped a guide wire on a cellular phone tower and crashed, according to news reports. He was on his way to a business appointment in Indianapolis. A passenger, Rev. William C. Bryant, also died in the accident.
Source – https://www.plasticsnews.com/article/20021021/NEWS/310219984/newsclips
Peter R. Kuehne – Owner and president of Kuehne Chemical Co. (2003)
Peter Kuehne, owner and president of Kuehne Chemical Co., was the pilot of the plane. The plane was registered to Kuehne Chemical Co. of Kearny, N.J.
Scott Roberts, Vance Roberts and Michael Borczik – Plymouth Foam (2005)
At 9:20 a.m., on Friday, Feb. 4, 2005, a small plane crashed in rural Berrien County, Mich., killing all four men onboard. On that bleak winter morning, four women were widowed, seven children were left fatherless, and one company’s management team was snuffed out, all in an instant.
Gone were Scott Roberts, 41, president and co-owner of Plymouth Foam; his brother, Vance Roberts, 49, vice president of development & technical services and co-owner; and Michael Borczik, 50, vice president of operations.
The shocking news hit hard at Plymouth Foam, a longtime supplier of foam insulation to the garage door industry. The jobs of 200 employees hung in the balance at the firm’s headquarters in Plymouth, Wis., and at two other manufacturing sites in Minnesota and Ohio.
Source – https://www.dasma.com/plane-crash-claims-plymouth-foam-execs/
Daniel Lee Eberhardt — Founder & CEO of MRC Polymers (2006)
Eberhardt founded his own plastics recycling company MRC Polymers in 1980. The company had more than 140 employees and seven facilities in the U.S. and Mexico.
The dashboards of more than 5 million Chrysler mini-vans feature his company’s recycled resins, said MRC Chief Financial Officer Steve Sola.
He was killed 19 Oct 2006 when his single-engine plane crashed after takeoff.
Shortly after takeoff from Tipton Airport, the pilot — it is not clear whether it was Eberhardt or Getz — radioed that the plane was headed back. The pilot did not signal distress.
Seconds later, the plane clipped the top of a tree and crashed into a clearing in a wooded area near the runway.
Source – https://archive.triblive.com/news/reunited-sweethearts-die-in-plane-crash/
Robert V. Chandran – CEO of Chemoil (2008)
Chandran was born in 1950 in Mumbai, India. Chandran first made his fortune in California, investing in real estate in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1981, he was naturalized as a U.S. citizen, and in the same year he founded Chemoil, a chemical and oil trading company specializing in ship-fueling. Chandran moved his family to Singapore after watching a Singapore National Day Rally on television. He relinquished his U.S. citizenship and became a Singaporean in 2005.
Chandran died on 7 January 2008 from injuries sustained when the helicopter in which he was travelling crashed in the Riau province of Indonesia. News of his death caused Chemoil’s share price to drop by around 16 per cent.
Source – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Chandran
Source – https://www.sammyboy.com/threads/robert-chandran.62811/
David P. Eckstein – Founder and CEP of Edge Plastics founder (2008)
Killed were pilot David P. Eckstein, 67, and his wife, Janet M. Hanna, 66; and passengers John D. McCarter, 68, and his wife, Karen S. Saprano, 62, of Mansfield. Eckstein’s recently purchased 1972 Cessna 340 crashed about 12:40 p.m. into the backyard of a home roughly 50 miles east of Toledo, according to the Ohio State Highway Patrol.
The plane was on approach to land at a regional airport. Officials there reported no distress call was made.
A Federal Aviation Administration investigator who saw the crash told state officials the plane was flying lower and slower than for a normal landing. The crash remains under investigation.
Christophe de Margerie – Total CEO (2014)
Christophe de Margerie, the chief executive of French oil company Total, died in an air crash in Moscow. His corporate jet collided with a snow plough and was then engulfed in flames. All four people on board were killed. The driver of the snow plough was drunk, according to Russian investigators.
Source – https://www.bbc.com/news/business-29699733
Family Drama and Trauma
Behind every headline like “CEO dies in plane crash” there’s a ripple of shock and loss — people waiting at home, children suddenly facing a life without a parent, colleagues stunned into silence. The logistics — identifying the body, arranging transport, facing the funeral — those are the first raw layers of a much longer grief.
The widows and orphans are left with an emptiness that anniversaries will reopen year after year. Birthdays, holidays, or the day of the crash — all become reminders. Even the sound of an airplane overhead might feel different forever.
Executives’ deaths are often described in financial or corporate terms — shares fall, succession plan activated — but that language hides the real aftermath: the quiet tears, the children who grow up wondering what kind of person their father or mother really was, the partners who replay the last goodbye.
Every crash leaves behind not just wreckage, but a circle of people whose lives will never be the same.
Assassination vs accidents
All these plane incidents were registered as accidents but many of them were probably assassinations if you ask me: Willard Henry Dow, Enrico Mattei, Robert V. Chandran, Christophe de Margerie …
The dashboards of more than 5 million Chrysler mini-vans contained recycled resins … seriously … recycled resins? Was this inquired by the FBI?
What’s the common thread of these plane crashes? Let me tell you: The business of oil is a hard world, not for the faint of heart…. for tough boys.
I encourage you to read the following article:
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