Aeronautics: Wild Plane

Citizens of San Gabriel, Calif., looking up one day last week, saw a figure drop over the edge of a plane in the sky, a parachute blossom out. The wild plane flew on until it was over the city, dived steeply, then leveled out at 1,000 ft. and headed for the business district. Rocking and zigzagging, it finally lunged toward the railroad station, veered at the last second and ripped into a line of telegraph wires, flopped over, fell into the backyard of an empty house. A sigh of relief breathed through San Gabriel. A minute later Pilot Morrie Gordon, who had taken the plane up from Los Angeles’ Alhambra Airport for a pleasure ride, lit blandly on the edge of town. Citizens were amazed to learn that he could not have been held responsible for any damage his plummeting plane might have done, was not legally responsible to the plane’s owner, Mark G. Carlton, for the cracked-up ship.

When R. Jordarki Kuparant made the first emergency parachute jump in 1880 when his balloon caught fire over Poland, he was a hero. So was U.S. Captain Albert Berry when he made the first test parachute jump from an airplane in 1912. Since 1919 552 flyers have bailed out with parachutes, left their ships to rocket wildly to earth. A notable fall in this rain came in 1919 when the airship Wing foot Express burst into flames while flying over Chicago’s business district. The two pilots parachuted away. The Wingfoot Express crashed through the skylight of Illinois Trust & Savings Bank, killing 13 bank employes. Much more frequent are accidents in which the pilot of a plane disabled over the city has crashed with his ship.

“Absolutely liable for injury to persons or property on the land or water beneath” is the plane owner, by statutes in most of the 48 States. The pilot is liable only for the result of his own negligence. But since a crashed plane destroys most clues to negligence, pilots are rarely charged. If the Department of Commerce’s post-crash investigation shows that the pilot abandoned his plane unnecessarily, or too hastily, his license may be revoked. But in general aviation etiquet leaves the problem of whether to jump or not to jump entirely to the pilot’s judgment.

Another kind of pilot was at the controls of a blazing plane over France one night last week, on the regular Paris-Marseilles mail run. The wireless operator went over the side but the pilot pumped his extinguisher until he had put out the fire. Then he flew on to Lyons; the wireless operator caught up by train.