Transport: First Flight

Mr. Charles Clifford Bane is 46, married, has one son and a shoe business in Washington, D. C. Until last week, when he enplaned (see p. 16) on an Eastern Airliner for the 80-minute trip from Newark to Washington, he had never been in an airplane before.

With an 80-m.p.h. wind blowing and other scheduled flights out of Newark canceled three hours before, Mr. Bane, Philip King—a Maritime Commission worker—a steward, a co-pilot and Pilot Fred Jones took off in a twin-motored Douglas at 8:30 p.m. Aboard were 510 gallons of gasoline, sufficient for 1,000 miles’ cruising. This was fortunate, for, instead of flying the 222 miles to Washington, during the next six hours Mr. Bane & company flew 600 miles in circles.

Pilot Jones, shrouded in whirling clouds, bucked the wind until he thought he was over Camden, then turned back to Newark. He missed Newark, missed New York, missed everything except a National Biscuit sign which flashed up once through the gloom, until he picked out an airway beacon at 2 :45 a.m.

Meantime, Eastern’s Manager Eddie Rickenbacker plus a dozen other expert navigators sweated over charts and signals from Pilot Jones in a hopeless effort to locate the wandering plane. At midnight, radio stations, led by WOR, began asking listeners to “step outside and see if you can hear an airplane anywhere over your home.” Promptly from five States came 227 calls reporting the plane. Once the lost ship was said to be circling Manager Rickenbacker’s house in Bronxville, N. Y. When Pilot Jones at last picked up a beacon, one & all cursed with relief, identified it from its flash as the one at New Britain, Conn., 82 miles north of Newark, directed Jones to the nearby East Hartford Airport.

Neither passenger had lost his air-mindedness. Mr. King rode Pennsylvania Airline’s blind landing plane from Washington to Pittsburgh two days later. Mr. Bane took a plane home from Newark. Nevertheless, Passenger Bane recalled his maiden flight as “a night of hell. . . . Mr. King and I … thought as long as we were going to crack up we might as well sit down like a couple of men—and take it. … I realized what a man feels like when he sits down in the electric chair. … I wrote a note to my wife. I felt we were going to crash and probably burn up. I figured that is what you do when you crash. You usually burn so I wrote this note . . . put it in my pocket hoping they would find it if it did not burn too. . . . I prayed plenty. I was going to put Him to work if I could. When we landed . . . I was wet with perspiration all over. . . . I could have gone up and kissed that pilot. . . .”