Flight 410

With the routine efficiency of a precision instrument, Capital Airlines' Flight 410 took off from the Pittsburgh airport and headed east for Washington toward a soupy sea of cloud. It was 5:20 p.m. (E.S.T.). Aboard the DC-4 were 50 people --the crew of three, a baby and its mother, a honeymoon couple, Government and Red Cross officials, businessmen, a schoolgirl on a holiday.

Up front, on the left side, sat one of the best airline captains in the business: Horace Stark, 46, who had logged 2,500,000 miles and 14,000 hours in the air. He had invented the Stark Direction Finder used on some airliners. He had flown the same route many times.

At 5:56, Captain Stark radioed the Washington traffic control tower and asked if he could come in "on contact" (fly within sight of the ground). When Washington flashed an O.K., Stark started down from 7,000 feet. At 6:13, when he had passed over Martinsburg, W. Va., and was almost clear of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Stark made his last report--3,000 feet and still descending (through rain and fog) for a look at the ground. After that, Flight 410 was heard no more.

It was still raining next morning when Capital's maintenance director, James Franklin, circled his light plane over a 1,689-ft. Blue Ridge peak in search of Flight 410, then more than twelve hours overdue in Washington. Through a break in the clouds, Franklin saw a dreadful scatter of wings and burned fuselage, near the top of the peak. It was a scene with which the U.S. had become terribly familiar in the last three weeks. Flight 410 had hit the peak head-on 150 feet below the summit. There were no survivors.

After a preliminary investigation, CAB Chairman James Landis made an obvious preliminary finding: the plane had crashed while going down through the overcast. But why? Pilot error? Instrument failure? CAB inspectors set out for the answer. President Truman appointed a five-member board to study all the recent air accidents. In three weeks, 146 people had died in the flaming wreckage of DC-4s.

This week, an Army B-29 crashed and burned a few hundred feet from the granite summit of Hawks Mountain, Vt. Dead: twelve.

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