The Price You Pay

No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour . . . will make us one whit stronger, happier or wiser.

There was always more in the world than men could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast . . . The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being." --John Ruskin Six thousand feet above Arkansas the left outboard engine of the big DC-6 began to pop dangerous orange flames. Unhurriedly, as became his 52 years and his 20,000 flying hours, Pilot Laurens Claude flicked the switches, cutting the bad power plant and feathering its propeller. On her three good engines, American Airlines' Aztec, New York-to-Mexico City luxury liner, purred steadily on course for Dallas, 300 miles southwest.

Eighty minutes later Pilot Claude banked the big DC-6 into line with the twinkling lights of Love Field's long north-south runway, lowered the wheels and wingflaps for landing. Suddenly the outboard right engine sputtered and died. The two good engines bellowed as he poured power to them to lengthen his glide, but the Aztec was caught--sluggish and vu'nerable--in the drag of her extended landing gear and flaps. "She's a goner." shouted First Officer Robert Lewis. The Aztec's nose went up as she shuddered in a stall. Her left wing dipped and she swirled drunkenly into the corrugated metal corner of the Dallas Aviation School, at the airport's edge. Part of the big tail snapped off. The torn fuselage slithered through a powerline and a fence, ripped across the airport highway to spark a dazzling pillar of fire in the chemicals of an engine testing plant.

Pilot Claude, Copilot Lewis, their flight engineer and 15 of the Aztec's 41 passengers escaped from the white-hot pyre. When the wreckage had cooled, an American Airlines ground crewman stood sobbing as he kept count, in a little black notebook, of the bodies carried from the blackened metal. Total: 28. Three days later the heads of eleven major U.S. airlines were feted in Chicago at a luncheon (scheduled long before the crash) to honor commercial aviation's record for safety. Their statistics proved that IQ49, even including the Dallas crash, could still be one of the scheduled airlines' safest years, with 1.2 deaths per 100 million passenger miles. Every speaker at the luncheon sidestepped the ugly word "crash" until hard-bitten Eddie Rickenbacker, president of Eastern Air Lines, got up, threw away his prepared text and adlibbed: "Crashes are the price you pay for motion . . ."

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