"Error of Personnel"

"Error of Personnel"

Last week Department of Commerce fact-finders were confronted by another spectacular air accident from which to extract data to promote safety in flying.

A Montreal-New York plane of Canadian Colonial Airways took off with three passengers from Albany, just as the fog ceiling at its destination (Newark Airport. N. J.) was closing down to 400 feet.

An hour and a half later, groping blindly through the pea-soup atmosphere over Jersey City, narrowly missing rooftops. Pilot John Salway saw a chance to land in a meadow, saw too late the wires that marked it as the county's 200-acre power plant. A wingtip sheared a 132,000-volt wire. A flash, a crash, a geyser of flaming gasoline ended the episode.

Electrocuted or burned to death: Pilot Salway; Count Henri de la Vaulx, pioneer airman, President of Federation Aeronautique Internationale; Mrs. Mary E. Gallagher Williams of Providence, R. I.: Arthur V. Conklin of Huntington. N. Y.

Both Department of Commerce and company officials found immediate fault of the pilot, in that:

1) He took off from Albany on the strength of a two-hour-old weather report which itself was so unfavorable as to warrant further inquiry. (A subsequent report which reached Albany just after the plane had gone, would have kept it on the ground.)

2) En route to Newark, visibility was so poor as to warrant immediate landing.

3) The plane carried six hours of fuel, which would have enabled the pilot to seek a safe landing far from Newark or Jersey City after he found conditions impossible there.

In partial explanation it was reported that Count Henri, the distinguished guest on the trip, who was hurrying in evening attire to an important dinner engagement in New York, had urged the pilot to go through. In the course of his visit here. which was part of a survey of commercial aviation in the Americas, Count Henri gained a reputation as a "pusher." chafing under each delay in his aerial tour.

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