"Help, Help, Help"

As a passenger takes his seat in an airliner, he is not apt to feel that he is a specially marked person--usually quite the contrary. Young Bill Keyes, settling into his seat in an Eastern Airlines DC-3 in Detroit, felt as air passengers usually feel--partly like a piece of baggage, partly like a lonely soul. As the plane stopped at Cleveland and Akron, the seats filled up around him. Dozing, thinking of his vacation-to-come at home in Boynton, Fla., he scarcely watched as the plane lifted over the Alleghenies and dropped down toward the Carolinas.

But up in the pilot's seat, Capt. H. M. Haskew was getting reports of dirty weather ahead at Winston-Salem. At 1:10 a.m. he reported that he was over Greensboro at 7,000 feet; over Winston-Salem (17 miles west of Greensboro) at 1:15 a.m. Directed by air traffic control, he let down to 4,000 feet. At 1:33 a.m. he was cleared to the Winston-Salem tower for landing.

No one knows what happened next, or why. Haskew never called the tower. The CAA noticed later that the signal from the Winston-Salem radio range was weak and erratic. At 1:43 a.m. the plane smashed into the 2,200-ft. Blue Ridge foothills near Galax, Va., northwest of Winston-Salem and more than 50 miles from the field.

Ted Delp, a 33-year-old sawmill operator whose house was just a stone's throw away, was wakened by the crash and heard someone screaming for help. He jerked on his clothes and ran out. Gasoline was burning all around the gutted wreckage. His helper, Lawrence Mays, was already there. "The man was still hollering 'help, help, help,'" Delp said. "I saw he couldn't get out and I went under the fuselage and we pulled him out seat and all."

The man was young Bill Keyes. His 15 fellow passengers and the plane's three crew members were dead.

After twelve days in the vast loneliness of the world's last no man's land, six survivors of a crashed Navy flying boat, all members of the Byrd Expedition, were rescued on the edge of ice-clad Antarctica. Three of the crew had died.

Their twin-engined Mariner, out on a photographic mission, had crashed and exploded on a 1,000-ft. plateau of snow and ice. The six survivors had food, drink and fuel, a half-burned fuselage for shelter. When at last the rescue plane appeared, they got directions by signal light to walk to the nearest open water, eight miles away. A trail over the ice was blazed for them with flags and dye markers dropped from the plane. Five walked; the sixth, more badly hurt than the rest, was drawn on an improvised sled to the water's edge, where another flying boat picked them up and flew them back to the tender Pine Island. Among them was the Pine Island's commanding officer, Captain Henry H. Caldwell, who had gone along for the ride. Behind them on the icy waste they left the bodies of the first three known Americans to die on the Antarctic continent. Their memorial: their names painted in bright orange on the Mariner's wing.

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