Confession

The 1940-41 flying season is one that airline pilots and operators will long remember. In June Franklin Roosevelt scrambled up two of the most successful Government supervisory agencies airmen had ever seen. By executive order he made the independent Civil-Aeronautics Authority an appendage of the Department of Commerce, abolished the equally independent Air Safety Board. Airline men had found that the supervision of CAA and the "crash board" was hard-boiled but good; the lines had set an unprecedented record of 15 months' operation without an accident. Since the change there have been four fatal airline accidents, a fifth in which an airliner was destroyed. P: Last week pilots and operators had documentation for what had seemed to many a layman a wild charge: that some of the accidents, if not all, were due to CAA's reorganization. The documentation came from the new Civil Aeronautics Board itself. In its analytical report of the crash of a United Air Liner on Bountiful Peak, northeast of Salt Lake City, last November (TIME, Nov. 17), CAB frankly admitted the probable cause of the accident: the Salt Lake City radio range going out of whack before United's veteran pilot, Howard Fey, started to let down through a snowy overcast. More, CAB cited a miserable record of neglect, indecision and ignorance by its employes.

The Salt Lake City range is notoriously skittish. A heavy snowfall often knocks its radio beams out of kilter. In its 120-page crash report, CAB told what it had done to make instrument approaches to Salt Lake City safe. Three radio operators in outlying stations were ordered to listen to the range once an hour, be sure it was working as it should. The operator at Salt Lake City had the same duty. And just to make doubly sure, a recorder was installed near the Salt Lake City airport, recorded the functioning of the beam on a paper tape.

How did this scheme work out? CAB admitted that it did not work out at all. Howard Fey crashed around 4:42 a.m. The tape showed that the beam had begun to act up three hours before. But none of the four listeners had noticed it. Trip 16's company of ten had been dead on the mountainside for an hour before Operator Daley at Salt Lake City discovered that the range was out of order. (Mr. Daley had overslept, was five hours late relieving Operator Andrews.)

Other runs were due at Salt Lake City and the weather was no better, but Operator Daley put out no emergency warning. Instead he called the chief operator (then off duty) at his home. It was three hours after the range was found out of order and critically dangerous for incoming pilots, before a notice to airmen went out by radio. Meanwhile, three airline pilots on scheduled runs had flown up to the range, found it not working and made their way down to landings as best they could.

Beyond this miserable handling of an emergency, what stunned CAB men most was that none of the four men in the monitor stations knew what the beam was about, none had any idea of the urgency of reporting bad operation. For this, CAB, inferentially, took the blame. It had given each a book to read about radio ranges. All they had to do was initial it, to signify they understood it.

Most shocking of all was the admission of Operator Daley. He didn't even know which leg (of four in the range) pilots used in bad weather.

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