Painted Desert: 11:31

From the skies over Lake Mohave on the California-Arizona border one morning last week came the routine position report to Air Route Traffic Control: T.W.A. Constellation Flight 2, 10:55 a.m.: altitude, "21,000 ft. -1,000 on top," i.e., 1,000 ft. above clouds; estimated time over the next check point, Painted Desert: 11:31 a.m.

From above Needles, Calif., a few miles south of the Constellation, came a similar message. United Air Lines' DC-7 Flight 718, 10:58 a.m.: altitude, 21,000 ft.; estimated time of arrival over Painted Desert: 11:31 a.m.

"We Are Going . . ." Less than an hour before, the two planes had taken off for the East only three minutes apart (the slower Connie first) from Los Angeles International Airport. Now they were due to converge over the same color-drenched desert radio station at the same minute, both flying at exactly the same altitude. When, at 9:15 a.m., T.W.A.'s Captain Jack S. Gandy, 42, asked CAA for permission to fly his Constellation at 21,000 ft. instead of his assigned 19,000 ft., CAA had refused. But CAA granted Captain Gandy permission to fly at 1,000 ft. above the overcast, and when -as he reported -this turned out to be 21,000 ft., he was warned routinely that another plane was cruising near him. Moreover, according to CAA rules, pilots assigned "on top," as Gandy was, are charged with the primary responsibility for observing and detecting other aircraft in their vicinity.

The radios became silent. Then, at 11:32, United Air Lines in Los Angeles received three words of an urgent message. A tense voice without identifying itself called: "We are going . . ." Again, silence. Nothing was heard again from either plane.

After an hour of fruitless calling, CAA declared an emergency. From California, Arizona, Utah, from as far away as Texas, search planes ripped off the runways, fanned out to search for the missing airliners.

Overtaken. Shortly after noon, the first wreckage was sighted. On the impenetrable, rock-jagged slope between Chuar (pronounced shwar) Butte and Temple Butte, just inside the eastern edge of the majestic Grand Canyon, lay the shattered pieces of the Constellation, identifiable by her tail surfaces. Around 7 o'clock the next morning, searchers found the remains of the United 718 on a ledge at the top of Chuar Butte, 1,000 ft. from the Connie.

Clearly, the two planes had struck at 21,000 ft. over the Painted Desert, the faster overtaking the slower. The dead, scattered out over 2,000 yards of arid land, had burned in the fires of the crash. Of 128 men, women and children aboard the two aircraft, none had survived. It was the worst commercial airline disaster in U.S. aviation history.

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