Airlines: The 727 Cleared

For a while it looked as if Boeing’s medium-haul, three-jet 727, in service since 1964, might be grounded by Government edict. During a five-month period beginning in August 1965, there were four fatal 727 crashes, all of them during the final landing approach. But last week, reporting on one of the four disasters—an American Airlines 727 crash in Cincinnati that took 58 lives—the Civil Aeronautics Board blamed the accident on pilot error and cleared the aircraft altogether. The 727, said the CAB, has “no design deficiencies or unsatisfactory operating characteristics.”

The CAB noted that the 727 is built to get in and out of airports quickly, therefore has steep climb and descent rates. In the Cincinnati crash, the pilot simply descended too fast and probably did not pay enough attention to his altimeter. The CAB had already made a similar finding in a United Air Lines crash in Salt Lake City. There have been no rulings yet on the two other 727 crashes, one outside Tokyo and the other near Chicago.

In the aftermath of other aircraft fatalities:

> Congress finally, after a four-year-delay, passed a private bill to give $25,000 each to the relatives of 35 servicemen, mostly members of the U.S. Navy band, killed in a mid-air collision over Rio de Janeiro in 1960.

> A federal judge in San Francisco ruled that the Flying Tiger Line was liable in the deaths of 107 persons lost in 1962 between Guam and the Philippines on a charter Super-Constellation because the crew had inadequate sleeping quarters during the long flight. The judge also decided that Flying Tiger was not protected by the Warsaw Convention’s maximum liability ($8,300 per passenger) because the travelers had not been issued tickets warning them, in the fine print, of the Warsaw limit.