DISASTER: Stars Through Flames

Afterward, blonde Stewardess Jane Bray, 28, remembered it this way:

“The No. 2 motor was all afire and it seemed to have spread to the wing. I looked up and through the fire I could see bright stars.

“Suddenly there was a hard jar, just like when a tooth is pulled and you feel it crunch. The burning motor had fallen loose. The wing kept burning and we were coming down.

“We hit hard on the belly with an awful jar which would not stop. We slid across the sand. We who could, jumped out. The other survivors were handed down and we dragged them away. The plane burned slowly at first, and then fiercely. I do not remember too well. There wasn’t any sound but those flames.”

Fourteen people died in the leaping fire on the desert not far from the river Euphrates, near Meyadine, in Syria. Arabs helped Stewardess Bray and 21 other survivors of the wreck of the Pan American World Airways Eclipse, a four-motored Constellation that had left Karachi, India, a few hours before, bound for La-Guardia Field, New York.