DISASTER: One-Way Ticket

Shortly after midnight, 76 sweltering Puerto Ricans and five crew members jammed into a reconverted war-surplus Curtiss Commando twin-engined plane at San Juan, P.R. The first passengers aboard grabbed the leatherette bus seats in the middle aisle. The late ones squeezed into bucket seats along the walls. Five infants snuggled in their parents’ laps. Pilot Alfred O. Cockrill of Pittsfield, Mass., late of the Naval Air Transport service, took off, headed northwest for Miami, on the way to New York.

The plane had barely cleared San Juan Bay when the right engine, pounding for altitude, sputtered and conked out. There was no chance to get back to the field; Pilot Cockrill made the best of his only choice. He set the plane down on its belly into the mottled, moonlit sea, a mile from shore, 400 yards from a small island. The lights went out. In the black horror of the cabin many of the Puerto Ricans, chained to their seats by terror, just prayed and waited.

Life jackets were dropped, lost or thrown aside in the crush and panic. Some passengers could not swim, others cringed inside the cabin in fear of the shark-infested sea. In six minutes the plane sank. A few survivors, who had scrambled out, reached the island. Others floated in the water until Coast Guard boats, guided by the eerie swaying light of plane-dropped flares, picked them up. Of the 81 aboard, 53 were lost, including Pilot Cockrill and the five infants, all but three of the 20 women.

The crash was the fourth in two years on the profitable steerage-class run, shuttling Puerto Ricans between the home island and the back streets of New York City. Most of the traffic, on unscheduled flights, is handled by ex-service pilots with war-surplus planes—like the Strato Freight Co., which operated the Commando in last week’s crash. It hauls the islanders for $60 one way, flies whenever it has a load. It had operated strictly within the letter of the law. Refurbished and approved in April by the Civil Aeronautics Authority, the Commando was actually flying 500 pounds under its gross weight limit, 45,000 pounds. In Puerto Rico last week, there was agitation to tighten up the regulations: obviously something was wrong when 116 lives were lost in two years.