In the Alps

Some thought it was engine failure. Others blamed it on lightning. The company said the pilot, trapped in a storm-swept Swiss valley, had flown through a cloud, crashed blindly into a mountainside. Whatever caused it, the Douglas airliner lay wrecked among the pine trees, its nine passengers and crew of four all dead.

Thus last week did disaster overtake Royal Dutch Air Lines (KLM) for the fifth time in seven months, the third time in one week. Among the dead passengers on the Milan-Amsterdam plane were Louis Mariano Nesbitt, British mining engineer and author of Hell-Hole of Creation (i. e. Ethiopia), and Arthur George Watts, British artist and cartoonist.

Only three days before a Royal Dutch plane had cracked up in Persia. Six days before a KLM Fokker had killed six in a crash near Amsterdam. Seven were killed in a crash in April, and six died in the wreck of KLM's famed Uiver ("Stork") last December in Syria.

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