Flying Window Ledge

MANNERS & MORALS Flying Window Ledge

In recent years, big city exhibitionists, bent on suicide, headlines, or both, have taken to balancing high on window ledges while threatening to jump to the crowd-jammed streets below. It remained for a wealthy young Texas cattle rancher named Ollie William Cox to perform the same tragic stunt in an airplane.

At 23, Amateur Pilot Cox seemed to have almost anything a Texan could want.

He owned the 2,560-acre Double Heart Ranch near Sweetwater, Texas, was his father's partner in the operation of a 22,400-acre spread west of the Pecos River. He was married, had a three-year-old daughter, was about to become a father again. He seemed calm as he left Sweetwater's airport in his four-passenger Cessna 170 at 5:30 one morning this week.

Just after dawn, the Abilene airport picked up his voice: he was announcing by radio that he planned to crash the plane in a gravel pit and kill himself as soon as he used up his fuel supply. "Everything's all messed up," he cried. For more than three hours his plane circled overhead. Friends flew to Abilene, joined airport and CAA officials in pleading with him by radio to land. Cried Cox: "If you had done what I did, you wouldn't land." At 9:55 Cox put his plane into a dive, hit the ground and died in a welter of splintered fuselage and smoking metal.

Afterward the CAA dutifully announced a triumph of macabre bureaucracy: it had made a three-hour tape recording of Cox's last words in the hope of revoking his pilot's license if he did not kill himself.

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