On Bountiful Peak

It was after 4 o'clock in the morning and a light snow was falling, ruddy in the red glow of the obstruction lights. Off to the east, three miles away, the radio operator on the roof of the municipal airport could see the lights of Salt Lake City. Beyond, and to the northeast, the Wasatch Mountains jutted. From the west came the rumble of two big engines, over the radio the businesslike voice of veteran United Air Lines Pilot Howard Fey, eastbound from San Francisco.

Trip 16 was at 13,000 feet. The radioman heard her turn south and begin the prescribed letdown procedure to get under the ceiling. Few minutes later she was overhead again, now at 9,000 feet, headed north and flying out her problem as she had done scores of times before. Few minutes later Howard Fey made his last call. He was over the Layton marker, 18 miles north of the field. The operator knew his next move would be a turn to the left, into the "A" Zone, a swing back on the beam, an easy letdown from the north into the field. But nothing happened.

An hour later, with the plane still missing, a westbound pilot called. Something had gone wrong with the radio range, he said: he was hearing the "A" signal where he should be getting an "N." Salt Lake City airmen suspected Trip 16's fate before she was found, at noon, smashed against Bountiful Peak at 6,500 feet, 15 miles northeast of the field. All hands were dead--the two pilots, the stewardess, seven passengers.

To Salt Lake City flew Civil Aeronautics Board men to investigate the second crash on U. S. airlines in 65 days--after a 17-month period in which not a single life was lost. But Pilot Fey's flying friends thought they already knew the answer. The beam must have failed just as he turned off into the "A" zone to head south. Angling back on to the steady hum of the beam before heading south to the airport, he should have heard the cheeping dot-dash of the "A" until he picked up the steady hum of the course in his earphones. Oldtimer that he was, he would never have run across the course into the "N" zone (dash-dot) that marked approach to the mountains and disaster. But if the beam failed just as he made his turn, all he would have heard was the "A" signal. He would have heard it, probably did hear it, until the crashing end.

Meanwhile, in Washington, Nevada's Senator Pat McCarran, author of the bill setting up the independent Civil Aeronautics Authority, raised his voice. Less than five months ago Franklin D. Roosevelt by executive order reorganized CAA, made it a board under the Department of Commerce. The change was made over the protest of airlines and pilots, who had found CAA's administration stern but effective, feared a change might wreck a great safety record. Last week Pat McCarran announced that he would begin a fight in January to make CAA independent again. Said he: "There is no branch of the Government that is in greater chaos or confusion or in which there is greater lack of cooperation or harmony than in the present Civil Aeronautics Board under the Commerce Department. Many trained men who knew their business have resigned. As long as this condition prevails we will have air crashes."

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