Farmer's Find

Through the sky Death continued to dog commercial airlines carrying passengers. Last week, a fortnight after eight passengers & crew were killed near Salt Lake City (TIME, March 5), the following occurred:

One twilight in St. Louis last week Hugh Sexton, 29-year-old aviation editor of the Chicago Tribune, climbed into a ten-passenger American Airways plane, started back to his job. For fellow passengers he had a Manhattan advertising man and an Ohio sanitary engineer. Pilot Walter Hallgren had made the St. Louis-Chicago run for six years and was approaching his millionth flight mile. After the plane had bored 100 mi. into Illinois, thick, wet snow began to envelop it. The Chicago radio operator heard its pilot report: "Visibility one-eighth mile, ceiling 500 ft., ice forming on wings and tail." Hallgren did not hear Chicago order him to turn back to St. Louis. He felt his plane settling groggily, looked for a landing place. When the white ground reached up for him out of the white void, he flipped off his ignition to prevent a fire.

A flashlight beam danced on the snow as an excited farmer floundered toward the sound of a crash in his field near Petersburg, Ill. Etched out in the dark he found the wreckage half buried in snow, the four men all dead.

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