Flights, Flyers

Above San Diego last week two planes collided. Both pilots hastily climbed from their cockpits, felt for their parachutes, jumped. Lieut. W. L. Cornelius was too hasty. His parachute caught on the instrument board and he was dragged to his death with the two machines which crashed, locked together. So died the second of the army's famous "Three Musketeers" (TIME, Sept. 24). At Mines Field Col. Charles A. Lindbergh was for a time the leader of this group of which Lieut. Irving A. Woodring is now the sole survivor.

Thirty-eight thousand feet above Dayton, Ohio, Capt. A. W. Stevens and Lieut. J. H. Doolittle were taking photographs. When their instruments indicated that they were flying toward the city at the rate of a mile a minute, they were in reality being carried away by a head wind of 115 miles an hour. Soon the thermometer registered 57DEG below zero and instruments ceased to work at all. Finally the oxygen line to Capt. Stevens' breathing cap froze and his head nodded forward. When Lieut. Doolittle struck him a stinging blow in the face he recovered just long enough to see his assailant fall forward exhausted by the exertion this effort had cost him at such an altitude. Out of control, the plane dived thousands of feet into the oxygen-laden air below, where both made a timely recovery, landed the plane, delivered the photographs.

Bert R. J. Hassell and Parker D. Cramer, Rockford, Ill., to Sweden flyers, long lost in Greenland, last week arrived by boat in Denmark, enthusiastic about Greenland as a way station for trans-Atlantic flyers, full of plans for another attempt.