DISASTERS: Out of Nowhere

At one time or another, many a commercial pilot has felt the sweat of anxiety starting on his brow as he saw, off in the distance, a young fighter pilot climbing into the wild blue yonder with 2,000 h.p. in front of him and a good breakfast under his belt. Sometimes those fighter pilots experienced an exuberant urge for self-expression which could only be satisfied by a thunderous dive on a herd of cows, a pretty girl’s house, or on a slow and whalelike commercial airliner.

One bright blue morning last week, the crew of a National Airlines DC-4 had cause to file an indignant complaint: “three Grumman-type fighters” buzzed their plane as they were passing over Dover, Del. Another complaint soon followed : the captain of an Eastern Air Lines Constellation reported that a Navy fighter howled toward his ship “on a collision course” as it was passing near Willow Grove, Pa. and did not veer off until it was only 150 yards away.

Two and a half hours later, a 31-year-old Pennsylvania airport manager named George Humphrey got the fright of his life as he putted along near Fort Dix, N.J. in a Piper Super-Cruiser. A Navy F6F Hellcat fighter came unexpectedly up beneath him and shot out ahead of his plane, giving him “a terrific prop wash.”

“It stood me on my right wing,” Pilot Humphrey reported later. “I fought to level off. Just then the Navy plane made a chandelle, driving around back of me. It came up behind me.”

A split second later, Humphrey witnessed a terrible spectacle. An Eastern Air Lines DC-3 on a flight from Boston to Memphis had seemingly materialized from nowhere, right out of the sun. The Navy fighter smashed squarely into it, knocked off its left wing and the tail assembly. As the pilot of the little Piper frantically dodged falling pieces of metal, the big plane began tumbling helplessly toward the earth.

It crashed on a farm below and burst into flames, killing twelve passengers and a crew of three—the first casualties on a scheduled U.S. airline since August 1948. The damaged fighter plane crashed seconds later. A farmhand saw its pilot—26-year-old Lieut, (j.g.) Robert Poe of Fairfax, Va.—jump out just before it hit, fall like a flipped stone, and die in a field with his chute unopened.