Year's Deadliest

An hour and 25 minutes behind schedule. Pilot Noel B. Evans, Wartime flyer, of Yarney Speed Lines was bumping his way through a rain squall southeast of San Francisco one night last week. Behind him, in the Lockheed's darkened cabin, sat two nervous passengers taken aboard that afternoon in Los Angeles: a Mr. Herman Brown and a Mrs. Lavelle Lodwick of Hollywood. Driving rain beaded the cabin windows opaquely as the pilot nosed down over suburbs south of Oakland. He was presumably looking for an emergency landing field on which to bring his passengers to safety. Instead, he brought death to 13 people.

Thundering out of the night, the plane brushed a rhubarb patch, caromed off a tree and a shed, crashed through the wall of Joseph Arisa's frame house. It burst like a flaming meteor into the Arisas' parlor. A moment before, the Arisas, their four children, their roomer, his brother and two guests had been playing cards. Joseph Arisa, his clothing ablaze, leaped through a window. The others scarcely had time to shriek before they were incinerated. With them died the plane's three occupants. (Joseph Arisa soon died in a hospital.)

Great gobbets of flame and fiery debris were flung from the exploding wreckage, quickly igniting an adjacent house, five of whose occupants were injured. Fire engines nudged through crowds of terrified spectators to find both dwellings blazing, roaring pyres. The impact and explosion had been heard several miles away.

While the rain still poured down, investigators found the pilot's metal pencil, buckles and the plane's motor 100 feet away from the embers of the destroyed buildings, tried to piece from charred evidence the precise cause of the year's deadliest crash.

Few days later a huge trimotored liner of Britain's Imperial Airwrays, flying from Cologne to London, burst into flames, plummeted to earth near Essen, Germany. All twelve passengers and the crew of three were burned crisp.

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