Interrupted Plans

Handsome, popular, 40-year-old Prince Gustaf Adolf's future was assured. Famed in his own right as an Olympic champion horseman, he would one day succeed his 88-year-old grandfather and 64-year-old father as King of Sweden.

Soprano Grace Moore was always full of plans. They carried her from her Slabtown, Tenn. home to musical comedy, to opera, to Hollywood and back to opera and the concert stage. Last week her ears were still ringing with the cheers of some 4,000 fans in Copenhagen's biggest concert hall, where she had sung Ciribiribin. "When the Iron Curtain descends on my voice," she had said, "I would like to be appointed Minister to Denmark." Meanwhile, there were more concerts to be given, a sick husband (ex-Movie Actor Valentin Parera--once called the "Ronald Colman of Spain") to be nursed back to health in France, and then a return trip to the U.S., where she intended to join the Roman Catholic Church.

Last week, Soprano Moore and Prince Gustaf Adolf were fellow passengers on a Royal Dutch Airlines DC-3 bound for Stockholm. She was booked for a Stockholm concert. He was returning to his family after a week's hunting with The Netherlands' Prince Bernhard. At Copenhagen's Kastrup Airport the plane, piloted by 54-year-old Gerrit J. Geyssendorffer, climbed 150 feet, stalled, rolled over, slammed to the ground and exploded.

Minutes later all that was left of the plane, its 22 passengers and crewmen and all their dreams and hopes was a charred and twisted mass of corpses and wreckage.

Sweden's attention turned to nine-month-old Prince Carl Gustaf Folke Hubertus, the dead Prince's son and next in line for the throne. Only the week before, Prince Carl had made his first official appearance when he granted audience to a French envoy and accepted a gold tumbler. Said Stockholm's Svenska Dagbladet approvingly: "Carl Gustaf acted with extreme dignity."

. . .

Thirty-four other persons lost their lives in eleven additional air crashes last weekend, and the fate of 35 others was still uncertain.

A China National Aviation Corp. DC-3 with 18 people aboard was long overdue on a flight to Chungking. In Colombia, another DC-3 airliner with 17 aboard disappeared on a flight to the Barranca Bermeja oilfields from Bogota. The bodies of four crew members and $2,000,000 in gold were recovered from a Philippine Airlines plane which crashed at Hong Kong. At Croydon Airport near London, twelve of 23 passengers were killed when another DC-3 crashed on takeoff.

The pilot, captain Ted Spencer, had just written a letter to a friend about recent European plane crashes. "Almost 100% of these crashes are on scheduled runs. Why? Because they must run--or at -least they think so. The charter services delay if necessary, and get a bad name-from the public for delays. But they appear to avoid these crashes (touch wood!). . . ." Spencer's wood was inefficacious. When he was killed he was flying a charter party, not a scheduled airline run.* Princess Sibylle.

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