• U.S.

DISASTERS: Death in the Air

7 minute read
TIME

An air-traffic controller hunched over his radarscope one morning last week as he nursed Trans World Airlines’ Super Constellation Flight 266 (from Dayton and Columbus) through rain, sleet and snow toward New York’s La Guardia Airport. At 10:35 an unexpected blip slid across his scope, and he picked up his microphone to call Flight 266 with unaccustomed urgency:

“Unidentified target approaching you at 4 miles, 3 o’clock!”

Replied TWA Pilot David Wollan: “Roger. Acknowledged.”

An instant later, the tower operator called again:

“Unidentified object approaching 2 miles, 2 o’clock!”

Again the TWA pilot, unable himself to see or be seen in the bad weather, acknowledged the call.

In those few seconds, La Guardia tower raised the nearby Idlewild airport tower by radio, asked if Idlewild had any aircraft in the vicinity of the TWA’s flight path. Replied Idlewild: No.

As the La Guardia operator watched his screen helplessly, the two blips continued for a second or so on collision course. Then there was one pinpoint where there had been two: the TWA signal had vanished from the radar screen, and the second blip crept on its northeasterly course for eight miles. Then it, too, disappeared.

Panic & Fire. On a street of old brownstone houses in Brooklyn a man looked up and saw “a large bolt of lightning.” In a house on Staten Island, across the Narrows from Brooklyn, a housewife heard a noise that sounded like a “thousand dishes crashing from the sky.” As she watched, the TWA Connie, carrying 44 passengers and crewmen, crashed to earth near by. Seconds later, a broken and torn DC-8 jet, which had been United Air Lines’ proud Flight 826, bound for Idlewild from Chicago with 84 people, fell out of the sky into Brooklyn.

Part of the jet cut through the roof of one house. Engines, fuselage, cargo, bodies cascaded with thundering crunches onto the street; rivulets of jet fuel skittered and splashed crazily and ignited into billows of flame, which in turn touched off the gasoline tanks of parked cars. Panicky tenants fled from a row of burning brownstone rooming houses. The empty Pillar of Fire Church (evangelical) turned into an inferno. Two men selling Christmas trees on a corner, a snow shoveler near by, and eight other Brooklynites were killed instantly.

A Fairy Book. From the torn DC-8 fuselage came piercing cries. A teen-age boy ran down the street, screaming: “Oh, those people are burning to death!” A passing priest rushed into his church for holy oil and ran out again to administer rites to the charred bodies. Seven alarms jammed the area with fire equipment. Ambulances lined up at makeshift morgues—a bowling alley and a vacant store—to transfer bodies to hospitals.

Miraculously, out of the flaming carnage a boy was hurled to a soft landing in a snow bank. He was eleven-year-old Stephen Baltz of Wilmette, Ill., traveling alone to meet his mother and sister in New York. Two cops rushed to him, wrapped their coats about his flaming body, rolled him in the snow. In a car bound for the hospital, the child asked again and again if he would die, and a neighborhood woman assured him that he would be all right because, she said, she had a son of his age. At the hospital, the boy asked if his watch was still running (it had stopped precisely at 37 minutes past the hour). “I remember,” he said, “looking out of the plane window at the snow below covering the city. It looked like a picture out of a fairy book. It was a beautiful sight. Then all of a sudden there was an explosion. The plane started to fall and people started to scream. I held on to my seat and then the plane crashed.”

“Over & Over.” As the hundreds upon hundreds of rescue workers fought their way courageously through the smoking disaster, others were converging on Staten Island’s tiny Miller Field, an Army helicopter and small-plane airport. The TWA Constellation had fallen on the edge of the field, a slim 150 ft. beyond a residential section and two schools. “It went down in a terrible way,” said one woman, “one wing gone—and it turned over and over very slowly.” Seat-belted bodies were flung everywhere. An Army squad arrived in trucks, played extinguishers on burning bodies, crawled into the wreckage, and with knives cut seat belts and pulled out a few passengers. Within moments, the snow-covered field was soaked with crimson, and soon, as in Brooklyn, the tortuous, dirgelike procession of stretcher-borne victims began.

Investigators from the Federal Aviation Agency, Civil Aeronautics Board and FBI arrived like an army at the crash sites. From Dayton, Ohio, where he had just delivered a speech honoring the Wright brothers, FAAdministrator Elwood Quesada sped to New York to direct the investigation. The answers to all the dark question marks would come only with careful sifting of evidence, but educated guesswork by trained observers already pointed the way.

Both planes had entered the New York area under clearance from Air Route Traffic Control center at Idlewild. In the heavy weather, both had been ordered to follow strict holding patterns while awaiting clearance to land: the TWA Connie at 6,000 ft. over Linden, N.J., south of Newark Airport; the DC-8 at 5,000 ft. in a stacking area over Preston check point, more than five miles south of Linden. As traffic moved, ARTC controllers directed the TWA plane to drop to 5,000 ft. and then, proceeding under control of La Guardia, to swing northeastward into the prescribed Instrument Landing System beam (ILS) to La Guardia’s Runway 4 (see map). To the radar watchers the Connie appeared to be following the routine instructions.

The U.A.L. DC-8, directed to circle at Preston, would, when cleared, have normally flown eastward toward Idlewild’s ILS glide path. U.A.L. Pilot R. H. Sawyer acknowledged and confirmed his instructions from Air Traffic Control to circle Preston, and his acknowledgment was the last contact Idlewild ever got. Since the planes collided in a spot on the Connie’s path—a good ten miles or so north of the jet’s allotted position—it seemed likely that the jet had somehow flown beyond its orbiting area into the La Guardia approach. Why Pilot Sawyer did so—whether as a result of instrument failure or human error (one radio was out of commission, but he had a usable spare)—may never be known.

“Everything—Everything.” The midair collision cost the lives of 139 men, women and children—the highest toll in commercial aviation history.

The last to die was the frail, fire-tortured Stephen Baltz. After more than 24 hours of half-life, of fighting to smile for his father, the boy closed his eyes and, said a doctor, “went to sleep.” His father William, an Admiral Corp. vice president who had flown in from Chicago, told newsmen: “Stevie tried awfully hard because my son was such a wonderful boy —not because he was my son but because he was Stevie.” Softly, he added: “We thought he would have been a tremendous and outstanding man, but we were not privileged to see him grow into manhood. Stevie was a real fellow.”

Said the hospital chaplain: “This is a devil of a thing. When you do everything —everything—and you lose out. God!”

In West Germany, a day after the New York disaster, a U.S. Air Force Convair, carrying 13 holiday-bound University of Maryland students and a crew of seven, crashed in downtown Munich shortly after takeoff, heeled sharply into a two-section trolley car jammed with Christmas shoppers, and exploded into a fiery pyre. All aboard the plane and at least 60 Germans were killed.

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