Hot Night in the City

It was a still, hot, muggy Saturday night in New York, the kind of night that drives families out of their apartment houses and homes into the streets and parks, onto their tenement fire escapes, and into their autos for long, aimless cruises along the webwork of the city's highways--the kind of sense-dulling night that makes people hope for something to happen to take their minds off the weather's oppression.

Then, something happened. From the radio came tense bulletins: Flight 102--Pan American's London-bound Boeing 707 jet--taking off at 8:37 from Long Island's Idlewild Airport, had lost two wheels from its four-wheeled left landing gear. There were 113 people aboard. The big 707 was circling, preparing for a .crash landing. The whole city seemed to sit bolt upright. From Manhattan, from Queens and Brooklyn on the western bulge of Long Island, whole families poured into cars and headed for Idlewild. Within minutes, thousands of autos were turtle-crawling the highway mazes leading to the field, choking the roads for five miles in all directions.

In the center of it all, airport officials briskly and calmly set routine emergency procedures into motion. A score of fire trucks, dozens of ambulances and police cars, all with their red lights flashing, took up their stations along Runway 13 (pointing 130DEG southeast), toward the end of its 11,200-ft. stretch. Orbiting above the field, Flight 102's Pilot Edward Sommers, 44, kept checking with the tower for wind direction and the state of preparations for his landing. (Meanwhile, stewardesses served dinner to the remarkably hungry passengers.) At Pilot Sommers' request, Idlewild operations sent out fire trucks to lay down a 4-in. pillow of foam on the last 3,000 ft. of the runway.

The plane swung above in wide circles, jettisoning some of its heavy takeoff (104,000 Ibs.) fuel load and burning up most of the rest at low altitude, waiting for foaming operations to be completed. The emergency vehicles on the field could hear the calm spurts of dialogue between Pilot Sommers and the control tower:

Sommers: What's holding up the landing clearance?

Tower: We're just checking on the runway.

Sommers: We're short of fuel.

Tower: We'll have [clearance] shortly.

Sommers: Make it very shortly.

At 12:29, nearly four hours after Pilot Sommers took off, he came in, expertly putting down most of the plane's weight on its good right gear. As the 707 eased over on the left, scraping the damaged strut on the concrete runway, huge sheets of sparks flashed into the air, until at last the plane rolled safely to a stop, a good 200 feet short of the foam carpet. At least 1,000 spectators and airport employees surged forward, despite the obvious hazard of leaking fuel and fire. A baby in the crowd whimpered; her mother snapped: "Shut up and watch!" As the first passengers and crew slid down emergency chutes, a burst of applause rippled the tension-charged air.

It was all over. Slowly, almost reluctantly, the 50,000 or more New Yorkers drifted back to their cars and edged their ways homeward, drenched still by the humid pall, their senses once again dulled by New York's night heat.

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