Disasters: Four Minutes Out

As jet-age schedules go, Trans World Airlines’ Flight 529 out of Boston is strictly a commuters’ local; before arriving in San Francisco, it makes stops at New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Last week, one of the aging Constellations assigned to the all-coach economy flight got only halfway before its flight ended in disaster.

At 2:04 a.m., four minutes out of Chicago’s Midway Airport, something—Civil Aeronautics Board investigators are trying to discover what it was—went seriously wrong. Pilot James Sanders, 40, veered north from his southwest heading as he fought for control of the Connie. In the Chicago suburb of Clarendon Hills, homeowners heard a sputtering of engines overhead, then a glass-shattering roar; for a moment, some thought that there had been a nuclear explosion at the famed Argonne National Laboratory near by. But the noise was the death of Flight 529, as it crunched into the earth and skidded in flame for half a mile across a field of corn and soybeans. There was no time to escape; the crew of five and all 73 passengers were burned to death, in the most costly single-plane disaster of U.S. commercial aviation history.*

—’ The record air crash came last Dec. 16. when a TWA Super Constellation collided with a United Air Lines DC-8 jet over New York City, killed 134 (TIME, Dec. 26).