Fifth for the Wasatch

United Air Lines Trip 4 swung east toward Wasatch Mountains, began the half circle that would bring it in over Salt Lake City airport from the south. It was 11 o'clock at night, and most of the passengers on the sky sleeper were in their beds. The red, white and green lights of the landing field twinkled mistily under a drizzling rain, but ceiling and visibility were not bad: 1,600 feet and nine miles.

George Gearhart, tavern worker, and Robert Pearson, railroad-yard checker, watched the big plane level off at one of the many shadowy knobs dotting Ensign Flat, a plateau east of the city. The plane flew past Ensign Peak. Any moment now Pilot Don Brown should bank, continue his half circle, sail in from the south. He didn't.

With a blinding flash and a sickening crash Trip 4 plowed into the rolling hillside, hard on the bank of an erosion gully. It bounced across the gully and up the hill like a tortured metal monster, strewing splintered wreckage, broken bodies, burst baggage and clothing more than 300 feet. Flames sprouted, spurted high, clearly visible in Salt Lake City's darkened business section, a few miles south.

Eyewitnesses Gearhart and Pearson raced through the rainy dark, found one man moaning, alive. They covered him with blankets, stacked luggage for a windbreak. But in a moment or two he died. Ambulance crews from the city and soldiers from nearby Fort Douglas counted up the toll: pilot, copilot, stewardess and 14 passengers, including two Sperry Gyroscope Co. officials and a year-old baby.

Preliminary investigation uncovered no hint as to cause of the crash. The meager facts: The plane was in no apparent mechanical difficulty. Although the rain gave way to sleet and snow within a half-hour, neither Pilot Brown nor pilots who came in before & after had reported icing difficulty. Wind was northwesterly, velocity 20 m.p.h. The Salt Lake City radio range, whose faulty operation misled another mainliner into a Wasatch ridge in November 1940, was working normally. Had Don Brown been 300 feet higher, he would have cleared the knob.

On the rugged, deceptive high-low Wasatch mountain range Trip 4 was the fifth commercial airliner to crash since 1934 for a total of 61 lives. For United Air Lines, holder of the National Safety Council's 1941 safety certificate, it marked the end of 17 months, and 409,000,000 revenue passenger miles, without fatality to passenger or crew.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.