Disastrous Dates Trivia Quiz

Answer: May 7th, 1915

On the afternoon of Friday, May 7th, 1915, RMS Lusitania was torpedoed by a German submarine off the southern coast of Ireland. She sank in less than twenty minutes. 1,198 passengers and crew perished.

Answer: April 14th/15th, 1912

At 2:20am on Monday, April 15th, 1912, the supposedly "unsinkable" RMS Titanic took a one-way trip to the bottom of the North Atlantic after colliding with an iceberg. It was the fifth day of her maiden voyage from Southampton, England to New York, USA.

The water that morning was at a temperature of -2C degrees. Many of the 1,523 deaths were caused either by drowning or hypothermia, as there weren't enough lifeboats for everyone aboard.

Answer: January 28th, 1986

On the morning of January 28th, 1986, millions of Americans gathered around their televisions to watch the launch of the space shuttle Challenger. In an effort to get children interested in space travel, NASA had designed the "Teacher in Space" program. Among the shuttle's crew was Christa McAuliffe, a high school teacher from Concorde, New Hampshire. In the crowd at the launch site were Christa's parents, her husband and her two young children, as well as students from her school.

Seventy-three seconds into launch, the cheers from the crowd turned to screams of shock as Challenger suddenly exploded. None of the crew survived. The explosion was found to have been caused by a faulty seal on one of the booster rockets. There's evidence to suggest the crew survived the explosion but not the 200km per hour impact with the ocean.

Answer: August 24th/25th, 79AD

On February 5th, 62AD, there was a major earthquake near the Roman city of Pompeii. However, Pompeiians were used to earthquakes. They slowly began to repair the damaged buildings and return to their lives as normal. What they didn't realise was that the quake was a warning that something worse was coming.

August 24th, 79AD, began as a normal day, but it would end in a disaster that would cost the lives of over 2,000 people. At around 1pm, the nearby volcano, Mount Vesuvius, violently erupted. The eruption continued until the early hours of the following day, August 25th, by which time, a number of towns and cities including Pompeii and Herculaneum, were completely demolished and left buried under tons of mud and ash.

Answer: March 27th, 1977

The worst aviation disaster in history occurred at Tenerife-Norte Los Rodeos Airport in the Canary Islands, Spain, on March 27th, 1977, when two Boeing 747s, KLM flight 4805 and PanAm flight 1736 collided on the runway. All 234 passengers and crew aboard the KLM flight were killed along with 358 aboard the PanAm plane.

Answer: May 6th, 1937

In the 1930s, airships were seen as the future of long-distance travel because they were faster than the average passenger liner. The largest of them all was the German airship, Hindenburg. Within her hull were vast sacks containing roughly 7.062 million cubic feet of highly flammable hydrogen. Although she was designed to carry non-combustible helium, the chief producer of the gas - the USA - refused to export it to Germany.

On May 3rd, 1937, the Hindenburg left Frankfurt, Germany, bound for Lakehurst, New Jersey, USA, with ninety-seven people aboard. She arrived in New York three days later but, due to bad weather, her landing at Lakehurst was delayed. Whilst waiting for permission to land, the captain cruised over New York for the enjoyment of his passengers. Finally, there was a break in the weather and the crew were told to return to Lakehurst for landing.

At 7:25pm, as a ground crew were preparing to tie the Hindenburg to her mooring mast, she suddenly exploded in a flaming fireball and crashed to the ground. Thirteen passengers, twenty-two air crewmen and one member of the ground crew died.

Answer: February 1st, 2003

Launched in 1981, the space shuttle Columbia was the oldest in the fleet.

On Friday, January 31st, 2003, after a successful 16-day flight dedicated to scientific experiments and research, the usual re-entry and landing checks were done. Everything went well and, at 8:15am the following morning, the shuttle began re-entry to Earth's atmosphere. Forty-five minutes later, whilst flying over Texas, the shuttle disintegrated. The entire crew of seven died. It's believed a piece of insulation foam, seen to hit the shuttle during launch, caused damage to the heat-protection tiles, creating a gap which allowed superheated air to enter the shuttle during re-entry.

Answer: September 8th/9th, 1900

On the evening of Friday, September 8th, 1900, the citizens of Galveston, Texas, were settling down to eat their evening meal. Without modern weather forecasting, they were unaware of the hurricane directly on course for their small, offshore island. By 8:30pm the following evening, most of the buildings were underwater and daybreak on Sunday morning revealed the town was completely obliterated. An estimated 8,000 people died.

Answer: January 27th, 1967

The first great tragedy of the U.S space program occurred on the evening of January 27th, 1967, and showed the very real dangers that the astronauts faced. Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee were training for the first manned Apollo mission.

They were in the Command Module, high on top of the Saturn 1B rocket, when a fire broke out. By the time rescuers were able to open the three hatches that give access to the module, it was too late. All three astronauts died.

Answer: December 21st, 1988

Just thirty-eight minutes after take-off from London's Heathrow Airport, a bomb in the cargo hold of PanAm flight 103 exploded in a suspected terrorist attack. Pieces of the shattered plane rained down on the Scottish town of Lockerbie. All 243 passengers and crew were killed.

A further eleven died when the plane's cabin floor and baggage hold slammed into Rosebank Terrace, demolishing the houses.