Mishaps

P: One midnight last week attendants at Miami municipal airport smelled smoke, then saw it streaming from the field's big hangar. Before Miami's fire department could get into action the hangar was a furnace, airplane gas tanks began to pop. Soon the red-hot roof fell. When dawn broke, a cloud of smoke a mile in diameter covered a heap of debris, the charred skeletons of 22 private planes valued at $508,000. Among them were an Autogiro, taxiplane and big machines belonging to Gar Wood, James Mattern, Alexander P. de Seversky.

P: For three years at his airplane plant at Evere, in suburban Brussels, Belgian Manufacturer Alfred Renard has been busy planning a revolutionary high-flying transatlantic machine. Partly financed by his government, and advised by Stratospherist Professor Auguste Piccard, he built a 14,500-lb., 1,950-h.p., trimotored plane with a 60-ft. wing span, designed to carry 20 passengers in its hermetically sealed cabin, to fly 250 m.p.h. at 28,000 ft. One afternoon last week Belgium's crack test pilot, George Van Damme, took it up on its first flight. At 150 ft. the machine wavered, bucked, but continued climbing till it was 2,000 ft. up. Suddenly it faltered, nosedived, crashed. Dead in the broken cabin was Pilot Van Damme. Only cause of the accident which occurred to observers on the scene was engine failure.

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