Transport: Pilot’s Voice

Like many another pilot’s wife, Mrs. “Cash” Chamberlainhas listened for years at 3,105 kilocycles on the short-wave radio for her husband’s cheery voice while he, a1,000,000-mile veteran, was on his Northwest Airlines runs. One night last week, after she had heard his buoyant “okay” as he left the plateau airport at Miles City, Mont., his voice suddenly came in again, strained, desperate: “Dispatcher! Dispatcher!” Later that night she learned that he, his crack copilot, Raymond B. Norby, and their two passengers were dead. Just out of Miles City in a light rain, westbound for Billings, both engines of their Lockheed Zephyr had, for some reason still unexplained, quit. Husky square-jawed Pilot Chamberlain, gallantly trying to get back to the field, went down in a gulch, 1,200 feet short. The ship, striking at fearful speed with a 25-mile wind on its tail, crashed into jagged pieces, burned to ghastly junk.