DISASTERS: Waiting Room

The administration building at Salt Lake City’s Municipal Airport was crowded, as usual, one morning last week. Friends and relatives jammed into its tiny, outgrown waiting room, impatient to greet passengers aboard a United Air Lines’ DC-4, enroute from New York to San Francisco. Aboard the big air coach were two executives of Sylvania Electric Products, Inc. and their wives, on their way to a conference in Salt Lake City. There were also five women, members of the famed 379-voice Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They had been on the choir’s summer tour of Europe (TIME, Sept. 19) and were on their way home to Utah. Also aboard was Dale Brown, an employee of a Hawaiian pineapple company, with his mother. Because Mrs. Grace Brown was nervous about making her first flight, her son had flown all the way to Kansas in order to escort her to Honolulu.

The scheduled time of arrival, 9:06 a.m., came and went, with no sign of the airliner. As the minutes ticked by, a slight feeling of tension invaded the waiting room. Children fidgeted. “Listen,” said a patient father. “When the man says on the loudspeaker, ‘United Air Lines Flight 409 now arriving at Gate One,’ that will be mommy’s plane.”

The announcement never came. In stead, there was a terse bulletin stating that the plane would be an hour late. Later it was announced that it would be two hours late. Finally the dreaded announcement came: Flight 409 was down. Late in the afternoon the anguished people in the waiting room learned that Flight 409, inexplicably 25 miles west of its course, had crashed into 12,005-ft. Medicine Bow Peak, near Laramie, Wyo., killing all 66 aboard. It was the worst commercial airliner crash in U.S. history.