Death at Christmastide

On Paris' Orly Field one night last week Pilot Herbert Tansey got his takeoff signal from the control tower and headed T.W.A.'s big four-engine Constellation down the light-bordered runway. Airborne, he picked up the landing gear and set the Star of Cairo on her course northwest for Shannon, Eire, the first stop on the regular Paris-New York run. It was midnight.

Back in the cabin, pretty Hostess Vina K. Ferguson moved up & down the aisle, settling the passengers for the night. She checked the seating list. The bald, bespectacled Frenchman nodding in his seat was Pierre N. Dreyfus, son of the late Captain Alfred Dreyfus whose false conviction for treason to France outraged the world 52 years ago. The older man was Herman Koegel, native of Rudnik, Poland. In New York his wife and daughter waited for their first reunion since the Gestapo snatched him from them and his small business in Koepenick, Germany, one night in 1938. The pretty, young French girl holding her four-month-old son was Mrs. Edith Augustine Delaby Waterbury, going to join her ex-G.I. husband, Charles E. Waterbury of Newark, NJ.

On the way, Tansey got the latest weather report. A ground mist was hanging over Rineanna Field at Shannon. It had all but "socked in" the airdrome; the ceiling was at 500 feet, the minimum for night landings there. Perhaps the Star of Cairo might have to go to Prestwick, Scotland, or another alternate field. Anyhow, there was plenty of time to decide.

When the Star of Cairo reached Rine anna at 2 a.m., Tansey was told the ceiling had fallen a bit; it was 400 feet, but there were signs that it would lift.

Perhaps if Pilot Tansey had pulled up to 1,000 or 1,500 feet, to circle and wait, the flight might have been routine to the end. But he was at 500 feet and there he started to circle. Through the scudding lower clouds he could catch occasional glimpses of the ground. "As he passed through one of these clouds," a T.W.A. official said later, "the plane apparently lost altitude and Tansey said he was suddenly flying into the ground."

Disaster struck in a finger snap. The sleek, shiny Constellation tumbled drunkenly across a swampy, weed-covered islet on an arm of the Fergus River not two miles from the airfield. The left wing struck first, then the nose, which broke off and threw the pilot and copilot clear. The rest of the plane hurtled on, scattering its guts, plowing a deep rut in the mushy land. Watchers on Rineanna heard a thunderous crash as the Star hit, saw the flare of the gasoline.fire reach high into the night.

In that red-smoky light, and in the darkness that fell black as a pall when the fuel was consumed, Hostess Ferguson and the other survivors worked in the mud and the scattered wreckage for two hours before rescuers reached them. The injured and the dead had to be carried through knee-deep muck to flat-bottomed swamp boats, then ferried across the estuary to ambulances. It took all night and all the next day before the grim and bloody work was done.

Eleven came out alive. Mrs. Waterbury and her baby were hurt, but both had a chance for life. But twelve others, including Pierre Dreyfus and Herman Koegel, were dead. Captain Tansey was in critical condition, his copilot badly injured.

Less than 24 hours after the Star of Cairo took off from Paris, a party of marines reached a snowy peak in California's Laguna Mountains. There, among a litter of wrecked engines, with gaily wrapped Christmas packages amidst the twisted metal, they found what they had come for--the bodies of nine passengers and three crew members of Western Airlines Flight 44--El Centre to San Diego.

On Christmas Eve, Pilot George B. Sprada had radioed that he was at 7,000 feet and could see the San Diego field 60 miles away in the sparkling clear night. A few minutes later, ranchers saw a flame on the mountain top. Then the weather closed in. It was three days later that a cowboy came upon what was left.

The holiday crashes were not over. The dead were still being brought down from the California mountain, and carried across Eire's Fergus River when the Chicago radio tower received an urgent message. American Airlines pilot Frank Hamm Jr., on top of the overcast en route from Buffalo to Chicago, had failing engines, would have to land on whatever was handy when he came down out of the cloud. He came out above the shore of Lake Michigan, headed for the Michigan City (Ind.) airport only about 40 miles from Chicago's municipal field. But there was not enough altitude left to make the emergency field.

Pilot Hamm headed for the clearest space he could find, brushed through a grove of trees on the way. The DC-3 burst into pieces at the crash. Somehow, the stewardess and 18 passengers escaped with their lives. But Pilot Hamm and his copilot, Harmon E. Ring, had made their last flight.

Over Shanghai's airfields on Christmas night the fog rolled, and China's budding air transport system had a situation it was not qualified to meet. One incoming airline pilot had no experience with G.C.A. (ground-controlled approach, the modern homing system which U.S. airlines still hope to get). Two others tried to work out their approach problems on ill-maintained radio sets, which failed them. Result: all three crashed, in the worst disaster in the history of commercial aviation. Injured, 18; dead, 70.

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