On February 28, 1966, Elliott See, a former Navy aviator, was piloting a T-38 trainer with his Gemini crewmate Charlie Bassett. Accompanied by their Gemini backup crew, Eugene Cernan and Thomas P. Stafford, in a second T-38, they were flying from Ellington AFB to Lambert Field in St. Louis, where the four would spend a month with the Gemini simulator. Visibility was poor, requiring an instrument approach, and both planes overshot their landings. Stafford followed procedure for a missed landing but See, despite the conditions, thought that he could see the facility well enough to make a second attempt manually. As later stated by Cernan, See tended to be more tentative in his flying, which was problematic with the T-38, which did not perform well at low speeds. On this second attempt, See undershot the landing. At the last minute, he hit his afterburners and tried to turn but he did not have the initial speed required. The plane crashed into McDonnell Aircraft Building 101, where the Gemini 6 was built, some 500 feet from the spacecraft itself. Both See and Basett were killed instantly, with See being found in his ejection seat in a nearby parking lot, not having cleared the aircraft. See and Basset were the second and third such fatalities. Fellow third-group astronaut Ted Freeman had died on October 31,1964 as the result of a goose striking his T-38 under foggy conditions. In order to avoid housing, Freeman turned and ejected horizontally due to being oriented nose-down. He was flying the exact opposite route of See and Basset, attempting a landing at Ellington while returning from simulator training in St. Louis.

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