TRANSPORT: Fire on the Hill

At 5:25 in the morning, darkness still cloaked the wilderness-rimmed U.S. Army airfield at Stephenville, Newfoundland. Flying conditions, however, were excellent. There was a 5,000-foot ceiling and ten-mile visibility. A steady, eight-mile flow of chill air moved across the vast runways. American Overseas Airlines’ Berlin-bound DC-4 Eire fled past on its take-off with the blended snarl of its four engines reassuringly shattering the silence. Men on duty in the control tower watched it perfunctorily as it climbed and shrank from sight on its hop to Shannon, Eire.

But six minutes later they knew that the plane would never cross the ocean. On a 1,600-foot hill, seven miles away, a fire billowed up silently and burned there as brilliantly as a signal flare.

As dawn came, field authorities started rescue parties across the fir-patched barrens. There seemed to be no logical explanation for the crash, The plane’s flight from New York to Newfoundland had been without incident. There had been a delay at Harmon, but for purely routine reasons. Weather had shut it out of Gander Airport, where a relief crew waited, and CAB rules had kept the plane grounded for twelve hours while its pilots slept. An engine check, made during the delay, revealed that all its power plants were functioning perfectly.

The Question. Both curly-haired, 31-year-old Captain William R. Westerfield and 23-year-old Copilot Robert B. Lehr were experienced flyers, and veterans of many a safe Atlantic crossing. Neither had radioed word of any engine trouble. Why had it struck a visible obstacle at an altitude of less than 1,600 feet?

Men who toiled up the heights discovered no key to the mystery. The plane had ploughed into a steep cliff, 50 feet below the top of the hill, had vanished almost as completely as if the fire-blackened rock had opened and engulfed it. There were a few pieces of metal, few larger than a man’s hand. Fifty feet from the point of impact lay a golf club and a child’s toy train.

There had been 39 people in the airplane—eight crew members, 13 man, twelve women, three newborn babies, three older children. The passengers had come from all over the.U.S. Mrs. Harriet Van Houten, 21, and her 6-month-old daughter Janet had lived in Yonkers, N.Y. Twenty-six-year-old Mrs. Helen Kent Downing and her two children, 20-month-old Barbara and four-year-old Laurie Elizabeth, were from Thomson, Ga. Mrs. Ruth Landsdowne Schmidt, 36, and her eleven-year-old boy Frank, were from Kenosha, Wis. Like all the mothers and most of the other women, they were bound overseas to join husbands in foreign service.

The inspection party found two bodies which had been thrown clear. The rest had disappeared in the flames.

There was only one possible method of burial. Sober-faced workmen packed 300 pounds of dynamite to the cliff, tamped it into the rock, set it off. An avalanche rumbled down. As had been done after the recent Newfoundland crash of a Belgian Sabena airliner, a Catholic priest, a Protestant clergyman and a Jewish rabbi read burial services from a plane which circled overhead. Then the wilderness fell silent again.

It was the worst crash in the history of U.S. commercial aviation.

At week’s end the Newfoundland wilderness had claimed its third wrecked airplane in three weeks. Two men were injured, one missing after a U.S. Army single-engined C68 Norseman crashed on a flight between St. John’s and Gander. The wreck brought the total of U.S. commercial crashes since Jan. 1 to ten. Total dead: 164.