DISASTERS: Death at the Back Door

Ten minutes away from a landing at New York’s LaGuardia Airport one night last week, 68 passengers stirred awake aboard American Airlines’ big orange, blue and aluminum Flagship New York, dutifully obeyed the “Fasten Seat Belts” sign. The brand-new four-engine turboprop Electra had more than lived up to its billing: normal flight time from Chicago at the Electra’s 400-m.p.h. cruising speed had been sliced a third. And the big aircraft had winged 713 miles eastward through almost steady rain at 21,000 ft. with barely a bump.

Forward in the cockpit, Captain Albert H. DeWitt, 59, wheeled the big Electra on a lazy clockwise arc into LaGuardia’s landing pattern, took position two minutes behind a Northeast Airlines DC-3, got his instructions from the LaGuardia tower. The weather was foul — a 400-ft. ceiling, two-mile visibility, wind eight miles an hour, freezing rain—but hardly challenging to a 28,000-hour veteran (40 hours in Electras) like DeWitt. Neither was the approach from the northeast over the East River through LaGuardia’s “back door.” The back door’s runway 22 was equipped with only a radio localizer enabling pilots to line up their planes with the 5,000-ft. runway, lacked the glide-slope signal and the brilliant neon approach lights of instrument runway 4. Routinely. DeWitt flew over runway 22’s checkpoint three miles away in The Bronx, lined himself up with the strip, acknowledged landing clearance with his flight number: “320.” The message was his last.

Aboard the tug H. Thomas Teti Jr. on the choppy mist-veiled East River below, Co-Captains Samuel Nickerson and Everett Phelps suddenly heard a sound across the water like “dynamite going off.” They flipped the wheelhouse searchlight on, saw, 800 ft. off the tug’s bow, the shattered hulk of Flagship New York settling crazily into 20 ft. of water a mile short of the runway’s green threshold lights. The tug cut loose two barges it was towing, churned towards the twisted wreckage, flashed a call for help to the Coast Guard. Nickerson gave the eight-man crew one order: “Forget the bodies. Haul in the live ones.”

Live ones, after a 135-m.p.h. plunge into freezing water and the swift current, were few. First Officer Frank S. Hlavacek, 33, clung weakly to a crumpled wing. Passenger Robert Sullivan, 8, bobbed to the surface with his dying mother, looked vainly for his father and two sisters. Stewardess Joan Zeller, 21, floated limp and badly injured. Despite the rescuers’ heroic toil, there were only eight survivors —five passengers and three crew. The others—65 in all—died in the crash.

Cruising on automatic pilot 35,000 ft. over the Atlantic last week, a new Pan American 707 jet transport suddenly nosed into a steepening glide that pressed 124 aboard tightly to their seats. Fighting heavy gravity forces, Captain W. Waldo

Lynch inched forward to the cockpit from the lounge, helped the copilot and flight engineer override the automatic pilot and pull the plane out at 6,000 ft. After an emergency landing at Gander, the plane showed no damage from the dive beyond a cracked wing-splice plate; investigators guessed that sudden de-icing of the 707’s trimmed elevators had sent the jet’s nose down. Favorite statistic of survivors: just before the 29,000-ft. descent, Captain Lynch had climbed from 28,000 ft. to 35,000 ft. to get over a storm.