Ceiling Zero

At Kansas City the TWA dispatcher advised his line's famed Douglas Sky Chief, eastbound from Los Angeles, to try a landing at an emergency field 135 mi. to the north. For more than an hour Pilot Harvey Bolton cruised over Missouri, his radio transmitter dead, looking for a "hole" in the thick fog. His fuel was almost gone when, about 4 a.m., Pilot Bolton roused his eleven passengers with a shout of "Buckle your belts tight!" and nosed down for a blind landing.

The big transport picked its way between a farmhouse and a barn near Atlanta, Mo., struck a fence, crashed heavily into a road embankment, turned over. Crushed to death were Pilot Bolton. Co-Pilot Kenneth Greeson, New Mexico's millionaire-Senator Bronson Cutting, a 20-year-old girl--sister of the TWA radio dispatcher who had been directing the plane. Injured were a mother and baby, the wife of a TWA pilot, five Hollywood cinemen and the wife of one, who died next day.

That afternoon in Washington, Senators wept openly and a Congressional recess was declared. Same day Manhattan newspapers carried display advertising of a "new, faster Sky Chief," pictures of another TWAirliner which last week flew from Los Angeles to New York non-stop in 11 hr. 5 min., broke the transcontinental transport record by half an hour. First Douglas to crack up in the U. S., Sky Chief's misfortune seemed clearly due to weather, not construction.

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