Well of Tragedy

One day last week an American Airlines pilot about to take off from Newark Airport with a load of passengers in a Douglas DC-3, discovered in time's nick that his controls were jammed. Cutting his motors for an immediate investigation, he discovered that his radio microphone had fallen off its hook by the seat into the V-shaped well in the wall between the movable control column and the fixed structural parts of the cockpit. Grim-faced at his narrow escape from tragedy, the pilot told his employers about it. They at once passed the word to other lines using DC-3's. United Air Lines, whose February crash into San Francisco Bay was still a mystery, quickly took another look at the wreckage in which seasoned Pilot Alexander Raymond ("Tommy") Thompson, Co-Pilot Joe De Cesaro and nine other persons perished (TIME, Feb. 22). They looked in the cockpit and there lay the simple evidence: Co-Pilot De Cesaro's microphone jammed in the V-shaped well at the base of the control column, bent and crushed as by heavy pressure. Reconstructing the tragedy, the investigators could see Pilot Thompson making his banked turn over the Bay; the microphone falling off its hook unnoticed; Pilot Thompson pulling back on his stick to bring the ship's nose up after the turn; the stick jamming, Pilot Thompson straining horrified against it as the ship roared on down to smite the water.

United did not announce its discovery at once, being bound as are all airlines by agreement with their insurance companies not to disclose accident causes until the Bureau of Air Commerce makes its official statement. This is to avoid premature damage suits. To avoid similar tragedies, United and other users of DC-3's immediately ordered leather boots to be fitted around all control columns, covering the V-shaped well. Spotting this innovation at Newark, the New York Herald Tribune's crack Aviation Editor Carl B. Allen immediately understood it, broke the story in a front-page scoop.

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