"Everything Went Black"

In Madrid in 1912 the French proprietor of a motorcycle shop owned a French biplane which he crashed during an exhibition. Chagrined, he dumped the wreckage in his back yard. To chubby, 17-year-old Juan de la Cierva and two cronies, this was tempting bait. They offered to rebuild the plane if the Frenchman would test-fly it. Laughingly he agreed. All that was salvageable were the motor and wheels. All the resources the three boys had were $60 and a knowledge of arithmetic. Nonetheless, to Madrid's amazement, their jerry-built contraption flew. It was the first Spanish plane.

The boys built several more planes and gliders with help from their rich families. In 1918 Juan built the world's second tri-motor. The test pilot crashed it by flying too low too slow. This rammed into the young designer's mind the two prime weaknesses of airplanes: they are utterly dependent upon their motors; they need lots of room to land or take off. Juan de la Cierva resolved to remove these flaws, began toying with helicopters (planes with the propeller faced vertically). He got the idea of disconnecting the helicopter propeller from the engine, enlarging it. Result in 1920 was the first autogiro, which did not fly. Neither did the second or third model. Then, according to legend, Music Lover de la Cierva and his wife were at an operatic version of Don Quixote when he noticed that the flexible blades of the stage windmill flapped slightly as they turned. He made the rotor blades of his next giro flexible. In January 1923, it flew.

At first ridiculed as "the whirling dervish of the air," the autogiro gradually improved during a long tour of Europe punctuated by frequent crashes, which proved the giro's safety because Pilot de la Cierva was never hurt. In 1928, when he flew the English Channel, he won recognition. From then on, England was autogiro headquarters. English capital financed the Cierva Autogiro Co. Inventor de la Cierva, Royalist son of King Alfonso's Minister of War, was glad to stay away from Spain after King Alfonso was dethroned. Except for an occasional spree with his four children, he devoted himself entirely to aviation, worked out two great improvements of his original autogiro design. One was the elimination of wings and other airplane control surfaces, making the giro controlled directly by manipulating the rotor. The other improvement, perfected this year, was the jump takeoff, whereby the giro takes off straight up into the air (TIME, Oct. 5).

Autogiros have still to be adapted to transport flying, since they are relatively slow and can carry only small loads. One morning last week, when Juan de la Cierva wished to go to the Continent, he stepped aboard a twin-motored Douglas DC2 monoplane belonging to Royal Dutch Airlines at Croydon. Aboard with him went a crew of four and twelve other passengers, including Admiral Salomon Arvid Lindman, onetime Prime Minister of Sweden.

A cold flannel fog bandaged the airport, delayed departure for two hours. Then it seemed to lift. With visibility limited to 25 yd., the pilot headed down the field, following a white line painted on the runway. Somewhere he lost sight of it, veered from his course. Instead of soaring up straight ahead, he curved toward a ridge topped by a row of houses in the suburb of Purley. The plane apparently was functioning normally. The pilot simply did not see the ridge in time.

Droning full tilt through the murk, the big transport clipped a chimney, sliced through two roofs, careened with a mighty crash into the side of an empty house. Exploding at once, it and the two houses burned for two hours, while the aluminum fuselage melted into little pools beside the charred bodies of 14 persons, among them Inventor de la Cierva, victim at 41 of the airplane weakness he was first to solve. One passenger and the wireless operator escaped severely injured. The stewardess, Hilda von Bongertson, was found wandering in the street, unhurt and unable to say more than: "There was a bang and a crash, then a terrible fire. Then everything went black."

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