A Calamitous Week

Calamities, natural and unnatural, struck almost simultaneously in Europe and Asia last week:

> Storm clouds hung low over London's Heathrow Airport when the "Eurocrat Special," a British European Airways Trident jet with 118 people aboard took off for Brussels. Four minutes later, the pilot, Captain Stanley Key, 51, radioed: "Up to 60," a routine message asking for permission to climb to 6,000 ft. He never made it. Suddenly, the plane plummeted to the ground and burst into pieces near a clump of trees four miles from the airport, killing everyone aboard.

It was the worst air crash in British history. The "black box" flight recorder, retrieved after the crash, revealed that the forward "droop" flaps that produce added lift on takeoff had been retracted much too early, which may have caused the plane to go into an irreversible stall.

To comply with noise-abatement regulations, pilots must reduce power settings at a moment in flight that is potentially hazardous because the aircraft is in a nose-up attitude and still climbing. A change in droop setting at this time can cause a stall. Normally, the adjustment of the droop is made by the copilot, and Captain Key had two relatively inexperienced copilots aboard. "It could have been that whoever was adjusting the flaps pulled the wrong lever," said a senior BEA pilot.

> Only two days before, a southbound train had entered one end of the mile-long Vierzy tunnel 60 miles northeast of Paris, at the same time as a northbound train roared in from the other end. Unknown to either engineer, part of the tunnel's roof had fallen in. The two trains hit the rockfall, which acted like a trampoline, hurtling them up to the roof at 60 m.p.h.; cars at the rear telescoped into a mass of tangled metal. Rescue workers braved the possibility that more of the darkened tunnel's roof might collapse and worked with handsaws because of the danger of explosion of diesel fumes. They took three days to pull 90 injured passengers to safety and carry out 107 bodies. No one is sure how many corpses remain. The two trains may have carried as many as 400 passengers when they entered the tunnel.

> In Hong Kong three days of torrential rains--26 inches in all, the heaviest downpour in 83 years--triggered a series of landslides that killed at least 100 people and left another 71 missing. The highest death toll was recorded in the Kowloon quarter, across Hong Kong harbor, where slides swept away a squatters' village. Three buildings on Hong Kong's Victoria Peak, where many of the colony's most expensive residential areas are situated, were also destroyed. One twelve-story building, with all its lights burning, seemed to tilt slowly before it plunged down the hillside like an ocean liner sinking at sea. Government officials worried about a potential threat to other buildings that have been densely packed together on the hillside. Hong Kong's clay soil becomes unstable when saturated with water, and so many buildings constructed so close to each other could result, in times of record rain, in mutual instability for all.

> In India, the problem was drought. This year the monsoon rains in some areas were delayed later than at any other time in this century. A heat wave roasted 14 Indian states, killed 800 persons and directly affected another 50 million. The loss in standing crops such as sugar cane and jute was over $400 million, and in several states famine relief measures were introduced to give work and wages to people who would otherwise starve.

The monsoon rains finally arrived in Bombay last week. But in Delhi, where temperatures hovered around 110DEG F., the people were still waiting for rain, as was much of India's parched northwest.

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