"Flight 901 A... &"

Shortly before noon on March 1, 1964, a four-engine Constellation operated by California's Paradise Airlines smashed into a snow-covered mountainside near Lake Tahoe on the California-Nevada border. All 85 aboard were killed. Now, after a 16-month investigation of the crash, the Civil Aeronautics Board has released a report finding that if the plane had been flying only 300 ft. higher or 300 yds. to the right, the disaster might have been averted. According to the CAB, the crash was caused by pilot error, sloppy ground maintenance, faulty equipment--and the falsification of a weather report by a Paradise official.

Three days after the smashup, Paradise's operating license was suspended. Later, when the outfit's license expired, the Federal Aviation Agency refused to renew it. At the time of the crash, Paradise Airlines was a two-year-old, scheduled, intrastate California carrier, flying leased planes between Oakland, San Jose and Lake Tahoe. It also had permission to operate charter flights to and from the Tahoe area. The doomed plane, Flight 901A, was a combination chartered and regularly scheduled flight.

"Sticky" Altimeter. During the eight months before the crash, the Constellation's compass system had been reported malfunctioning no fewer than eleven times. The CAB found that at the time the plane hit the mountainside, the compass may have been as much as 15DEG off. Only the day before, a Paradise pilot who was flying the plane had complained that his altimeter had been "sticky" during descents, remaining stationary for a while, then suddenly registering a 150-ft. to 200-ft. drop. As for the copilot's altimeter, it registered 100 ft. below sea level when the plane was on the ground at sea level.

The night before its last flight, the aircraft and its instruments were serviced--after a fashion. Paradise had no maintenance crews or facilities of its own, farmed out all such work to an FAA-approved Oakland maintenance station with licensed mechanics. The CAB found that the mechanic who worked on the Paradise plane's compass had never before dealt with one like it; moreover, he did not take the trouble to consult any available technical manuals for guidance. The altimeters were adjusted by another mechanic, who later told CAB investigators that he could not quite recall whether he had tightened a vital screw.

Flying Blind. Thus blinded before it ever left the ground, Flight 901A, piloted by Captain Henry Norris, 45, flew from Oakland to Salinas, where it picked up a party of 18 charter passengers for a one-day trip to the Tahoe casinos. The plane next landed at San Jose, taking aboard 63 more, filling it to its passenger capacity. At the San Jose stopover, Captain Norris received a weather report from the Tahoe Valley Airport. According to the CAB, Paradise's Tahoe station manager, presumably unwilling to turn away a lucrative flight, had changed an official weather report, causing Captain Norris to believe that thin, broken clouds existed in the Tahoe area, where, in fact, there were heavy clouds, snow showers and icing conditions.

Approaching his destination confronted by weather conditions that he had not been led to expect, and flying a plane that was not equipped with de-icing devices, Captain Norris asked for and got permission to climb to 15,000 ft. At 11:21 a.m., he said that he could see the south shore of Lake Tahoe. Eight minutes later, he radioed: "Flight 901A . . ." Then his radio went dead.

The CAB surmised that Norris, finding himself in a blizzard as he started to land, abandoned his authorized approach and headed eastward at 9,000 ft. toward what he hoped would be clear sky. "Then, either because they believed they had sufficient altitude to clear the terrain or because they were unable to climb higher due to structural ice, the aircraft leveled off," said the CAB. "At that time they struck the first trees and were unable to avoid the final impact with the mountain."

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