Transport: Crash in Crow Creek

Sitting in his office at Cheyenne, late one night last week, the airport radio operator heard the calm voice of United Airlines Pilot H. A. (“No Collision”) Collison report that his big, twin-motored Boeing transport, bound from San Francisco to New York with twelve aboard, was but a few miles away, 4,000 ft. up, ready to glide down for the scheduled Cheyenne landing. Simultaneously, another plane approached from the East. “Please delay landing until further orders while Westbound plane comes in,” radioed the operator to Pilot Collison. There was no answer. The operator signaled again. Still there came no sound of the pilot’s voice, no hum of motors in the quiet, clear night.

Frantically alarmed as the minutes ticked away, United Airlines officials sent out soldiers, ambulances, airplanes in search, tried to imagine what kind of accident had occurred. Not until dawn did they learn, and then the news was the worst possible. Looking down into the rough jumble of hills in Crow Creek Valley, 13 miles from Cheyenne, a searching pilot spied the gleaming fuselage of the plane lying like a disemboweled fish at the end of a quarter-mile trail of destruction. Scattered along this were shreds of cloth, lipsticks and compacts, magazines, pieces of sheet music, and, almost touching an oil-drenched cylinder torn from a motor, a copy of Look Homeward Angel which friends of the stewardess later said was hers. The cabin had not caught fire but was broken in two like an exploded firecracker. One wing was wrapped around the cabin; a landing wheel had crunched through. Some of the twelve bodies were scattered far from the wreck and most were mangled almost beyond recognition.

The plane was apparently intact when it first struck. Scars on the ground showed it hit three times before the final crash. After the first two bounces Collison seemed somehow to have gained 200 ft. of altitude, although the undercarriage was smashed and the engines lost, and failed by a tragic ten feet to clear the last hill which might have enabled him to make a “bellyskid” landing on the slope beyond.

What had caused this first fatal crack-up in some 28,000,000 miles of United Airlines’ flying, officials could not explain. Pilot Collison had flown 1,000,000 miles without accident, seemed not the man to have fallen asleep or stalled his plane. An immediate Department of Commerce investigation was ordered.