Smoke in Maryland

Above the green woods and fields of Maryland the sunny, early evening sky was cloudless and clear. From their DC-3, Civil Aeronautics Board inspectors watched Eastern Airlines' Miami-bound plane pass their slower craft and wing majestically down the airway to the south. The CABmen were flying back to Washington from LaGuardia Field after investigating the worst disaster in the history of U.S. civil aviation (see below). The plane that had just passed was doomed to figure in an even more horrible one.

At 6:45, while the CABmen watched with narrowed eyes, the DC-4 suddenly lurched and headed for the ground, 4,000 feet below. People on the ground heard an ear-shattering roar from its engines. The doomed plane's drunken glide steepened into a dive. From the vertical it went slightly on to its back, completing part of a wide outside loop. From the CAB plane, the inspectors saw it plunge into a clump of trees, disintegrate in a great cloud of smoke and flying debris.

Pools of Flame. Eastern's DC-4 had gone down in a woodland between the village of Port Deposit on the Susquehanna River and Perryville on the Pennsylvania Railroad; within a few minutes, automobiles from nearby towns and farms were headed for the spot. Fire equipment and naval enlisted men from nearby Bainbridge Naval Training Station soon joined them.

A vanguard of rescuers plunged through a half mile of brush and swamp, entered a boggy, smoke-filled ravine. Ahead of them lay a clearing, littered with splintered and uprooted trees. The trees were burning, and there were flickering pools of flame on the gasoline-soaked ground. Nothing moved. Torn sections of dura-luminum, shards of glass, smoldering seat cushions, broken instruments lay scattered for a hundred yards, but there was nothing to suggest the great machine's shape or purpose. Rags of clothing, women's purses hung with shocking festiveness high in trees. For a hundred feet the ground was littered with charred shoes, letters, broken suitcases, and fountain pens.

Scattered through it all were passengers and crew--53 in all. They had perished instantly. Almost everybody was charred and broken; arms and legs were strewn about and hung from the trees.

Next day the work of identification began. One corpse clutched a piece of metal in a blackened hand--it was presumed to be that of the plane's captain, William E. Coney of Miami, wartime pilot of the Navy's famed flying boat Mars and one of Eastern's best. Two other bodies were easily identified--a headless mother who still pressed her headless child against her breast. But in most cases the only sure identifying clue was to be found in dental work.

As the first white-faced relatives arrived, CAB field inspectors probed in the wreckage, interviewed eyewitnesses and searched the country round about for an explanation of the crash. They soon found a part of the answer. A quarter of a mile from the crash they found pieces of the plane's tail surfaces. Almost certainly they had been torn off in flight. What had shorn them off? CAB inspectors were not yet ready to say at week's end. Many an airplane pilot guessed that a propeller had failed, that a blade had hurtled back and cut into the tail surfaces. This theory had to be discarded when all the DC-4's propeller blades were found in the wreckage. CAB's crash detectives settled down to a longer search for the answer.

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