DISASTERS: Bolivia 927! Turn Left

Under the high overcast the air was sharp and clear; from the control tower at Washington National Airport, swarthy, earnest 21-year-old Glen T. Tigner could see for miles out over the Virginia countryside. Traffic was light. A war surplus P-38, owned by the Bolivian government, took off for a practice flight at 11:37. It snarled off out of sight. Then there was a lull before Eastern Air Lines flight 537, a four-engine DC-4 inbound from New York, asked for landing instructions.

Tigner directed Eastern’s pilot to enter a left-hand traffic pattern, go counterclockwise around the airport and land on runway No. 3 into the northeast wind. The transport snored steadily in on the prescribed course. Then the Bolivian pilot in the P-38 called in on another frequency and also asked the tower for landing instructions.

Wheels Down. The young traffic controller looked into the sky over the distant roofs of Alexandria, southeast of the field, and saw the fighter circling at 5,000 feet. He switched to its radio channel, told its pilot too to circle the field in the left-hand traffic pattern. He got no acknowledgment. As the transport began its final turn, the men in the tower saw a fearful sight—the fighter, wheels down, was streaking straight in for the same runway on which the DC-4 was about to settle down.

Tigner began calling: “Bolivia 927 . . . Bolivia . . . Bolivia . . . turn left . . . turn left . . . Traffic, Eastern DC-4 on final approach and below!” The P-38 barreled on toward destruction. Not until the last seconds did Tigner switch back to the DC-4’s channel (its pilot could not hear his talk to the fighter, had no means of knowing a plane was bearing down on him from above) and order: “Turn left! P-38 is traffic!” The big plane began to turn.

The warning came too late. The P-38 hurtled into the passenger-jammed DC-4 with the split-second destructiveness of a huge explosive shell; its twin propellers chewed through the big plane with a shriek and its projectile impact broke the big plane’s back. As the P-38 ricocheted off and plummeted into the river, the shattered transport flashed with fire and broke in two in midair.

The tail section fluttered down, turning over & over, scattering debris and bodies, and smashed to rest, belly-up, on the riverbank. The forward half of the plane seemed to linger in the air. Then it too plunged down, hit the river in a burst of spray, and was gone.

At the airport, at the Air Force’s Boiling Field across the river, and along miles of streets in Washington and its suburbs, sirens began to howl. Ninety ambulances, dozens of police cars careened to the rescue.

There was little to be done. Fifty-four of the 55 men, women & children on the DC-4—among them famed Cartoonist Helen Hokinson (see PRESS), Congressman George J. Bates of Massachusetts—had died in the river or in a horrid welter of broken bodies, smashed baggage and torn metal on shore. One woman lived long enough to die in a hospital. It was the biggest death toll in U.S. airline history.

The Survivor. Somehow the pilot of the fighter escaped alive. Crash boats, foaming out across the river, saw him weakly treading water, and an Air Force sergeant managed to haul him to safety just as he lost consciousness. At Alexandria Hospital, where doctors found he had a broken back, crushed ribs and serious contusions, he was identified as Captain Eric Rios Bridoux, Bolivia’s most famous airman.

A hero in Bolivia, where he had once been a one-man air force in an abortive revolution, Rios Bridoux had flown every type of airplane without accident, had studied under U.S. Army flying instructors, and was now in the U.S. to buy planes for the Bolivian air force. He had burned for years, said friends, to perform some Lindbergh-like feat of aerial derring-do which would “Make Bolivia famous.”

Was he to blame for the crash? No one could know until the CAB finished its exhaustive inquiry. It was quite probable that the Bolivian had not interpreted the tower’s first landing instructions correctly, almost certain that he did not see the transport under his wings as he closed on it. The CAB would also have to decide whether the young tower-traffic controller should have warned the DC-4 earlier, instead of concentrating on warning off a pilot who apparently did not hear or did not understand his instructions.