DISASTERS: Can You See Many Lights?

The football season had been a bleak one for California State Polytechnic College, the pride of the California mission city of San Luis Obispo—five games lost and only one victory. All the same, an adventurous excitement built up as the squad got ready for its one big faraway fling of the year, a game with Bowling Green State University near Toledo, Ohio. After recoiling at the cost of a four-engined plane, the school settled on a charter from Arctic-Pacific Airlines ($7,700) in a C-46, a tired, twin-engined relic of World War II.

Year before, an overloaded Arctic-Pacific plane had made a forced landing with the Cal Poly team, and this time the stay-at-homes jokingly plastered the team’s lockers with pictures of air crashes. Even so, many an envious rooter turned out to see the 35 members of the team, four coaches, the manager, doctor and a sportswriter from the San Luis Obispo Telegram-Tribune off on the big junket.

Down the Runway. The eastbound trip was uneventful. While Bowling Green mangled Cal Poly 50-6, the chartered C46 flew on to ferry the Youngstown University squad to New Haven. Conn., then turned back to take Cal Poly home. At take-off time, Toledo airport was socked in solid with fog. Brent Jobe, an end and student pilot, told his friends that he thought it was crazy to take off. Head Coach Leroy Hughes talked worriedly to the copilot. But Pilot Donald Leland

John Chesher, 39, who got paid only for time he was in the air, elected to fly. So thick was the fog that he first scouted the concrete apron on foot to spot parked planes so he would not run into them as he taxied out. Then he got an airport mechanic to walk ahead of him and through the mist point the way as he inched the plane toward takeoff.

“Can you see many runway lights?” asked the tower. “I can see three,” came the answer. The tower operator reminded Chesher that the lights were 300 ft. apart: Chesher could see less than 1,000 ft. down a runway that had a 4,000-ft. take-off minimum.* Nevertheless, the C-46’s engines surged, and the plane lumbered off down the runway. Moments later there was an explosive crash. When rescue crews finally groped their way through the fog, they found the C46 mangled and torn on a taxiway to the left of the runway. Twenty-two passengers in the crumpled, burning nose section were dead. Twenty-six in the broken-off tail section got out alive with various stages of injury. The dead included 16 members of the Cal Poly squad.

The Wrong Seat. The plane was clear-ly overloaded. And the crash seemed even more inexcusable when the Federal Aviation Agency turned to its records on Pilot Chesher. A veteran of the R.C.A.F. and U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II, Chesher had been flying for Arctic-Pacific for three years. Over the years he was charged with nearly a dozen violations of civil air regulations—falsifying engine time (an old trick of shaky, non-sked airlines to stretch the time between mandatory engine inspections), flying more hours during a given period than safety regulations permit, falsifying a manifest to show a copilot who was not aboard, etc. After a formal hearing, his license was suspended last July by FAA, and Arctic-Pacific was fined $16,000. Chesher appealed and, pending a review, he was free to fly. When rescue workers recovered his body from the wreckage, they found it strapped in the right-hand cockpit seat. Despite the fog, Donald Chesher had apparently turned over the pilot’s seat to a less-experienced man: Copilot Howard Perovich, 30 (whose mother and sister-in-law died with him in the crash).

It was small comfort to San Luis Obispo that the FAA belatedly grounded all Arctic-Pacific planes. Through the week, while its flags hung at half mast, the town was as glum as the cool, grey fog that rolled in from the Pacific. Cal Poly remembered Halfback Vic Hall, an alternate 400-meter sprinter on the 1960 Olympic team. Vic wore contact lenses and had not wanted to play football, but the weak team needed him for his exceptional speed, so he had agreed to play. There was Curtis Hill, an end from Bakersfield, a smiling, studious, religious boy who had walked the campus squeezing a tennis ball to strengthen his wrists. His friends recalled that he had hoped to play pro ball with the San Francisco 49ers. There was Tackle Rodney Baughn, who was engaged to marry a Cal Poly coed who had just bought her wedding dress. All were dead, along with 13 of their buddies.

“What words are of any use when you have to call a family and tell it a son is dead?” asked Dean Clyde Fisher. The student body gathered sadly for a memorial service in the gym, and the rest of Cal Poly’s football season, including the homecoming game with Los Angeles State, was canceled. It seemed doubtful that Cal Poly would ever field another football team again.

*The tower operator had no authority to stop him. Fields may be officially closed to incoming planes, but under civil aviation rules, a properly qualified pilot is the final judge of whether it is safe for him to take off.