MASSACHUSETTS: The Furnace

By the time Pilot J. Nelson Pell was over Boston, on a charter flight from Montreal, it was past midnight. The weather had closed down. For more than an hour, Pilot Pell, a veteran of 7,000 hours of transport flying, flew about in the woolly dark with his three passengers—Thomas Mandell, treasurer of Boston’s Carrier-Mandell Inc. (airconditioning) and Mandell’s two daughters. At 2:21 a.m., he started to descend. Below him as his little Stinson got near the ground, was a row of lights.

But they did not mark an airport. One of them was the pilot flame in a squat, chimney-like waste-gas furnace, set in a field of oil and gas storage tanks owned by the Colonial Beacon Oil Co. As the plane glided in, it narrowly missed the great, fog-shrouded tanks. A little way beyond, it hit the soft chimney a few feet from the top, disintegrated, threw one body between the chimney’s two walls and hurled the others into the pilot flame at the bottom of the pit. Workmen reached through trap doors with steel hooks to draw the bodies of Nelson Pell and his passengers from the fire.