Sending Blind

It was broad, bright daylight--no time for alarm, let alone tragedy. Yet radio receivers in United Air Lines offices at Salt Lake City, Denver and San Francisco crackled out a message pregnant with fear: "United 608 sending blind [i.e., calling any station because of emergency]. We have baggage afire aboard this airplane. We are going into Bryce. Don't know if the fire is out yet. We have a smoke-filled airplane."

Flight 608 was a giant four-motored DC-6 which had taken off from Los Angeles at 9:23 a.m., two hours before, bound for New York with 47 passengers and a crew of five. As soon as the ship's veteran pilot, 42-year-old Captain E. L. McMillen, had discovered the fire, he had reversed his course, headed back over southwestern Utah's jagged Bryce Canyon country, to an emergency strip 20 miles away.

In United's Salt Lake City office, Radio Operator Ken Thorton tried to call the blazing DC-6. No answer. Five minutes later, he picked up another message from Captain McMillen: "United 608. Our tail is gone. We may get down and we may not." A minute later, a third message: "United 608. We may make it. We may make it. Approaching strip."

Captain McMillen didn't make it. The big plane, last seen in flight by a deer hunter who reported that its undersides were aflame and that it was dropping unidentifiable objects, managed to skim over the precipitous wall of a canyon. But then, just 1,500 yards short of the airstrip, it crashed, churned 300 feet up a sage-covered slope, exploded and disintegrated. Nobody survived; nobody could have. Among those who died: Jack Guenther, managing editor of Look; Pro Footballer Jeff Burkett, Chicago Cardinals' halfback; Gerard B. Lambert Jr., scion of a famed drug dynasty (see MILESTONES).

It was the first crash of a DC-6, luxurious, pressurized, 300-mile-an-hour craft which went into commercial service last spring. The toll was U.S. aviation's second highest (the highest: 53, killed last May in a DC-4 crash near Port Deposit, Md.). What caused the baggage fire was a question which might never be answered. All the baggage of Flight 608 was loaded into belly cargo pits through which passed no gasoline lines or electric wires. The pits carried automatic smoke indicators and extinguishing apparatus. It seemed unlikely that matches, cigarette lighters or other ordinary objects in the passengers' luggage could have set the ship afire.

Two days later, Pan American World Airways reported that one of its DC-4 Alaska Clippers, with 13 passengers and a crew of five aboard, was missing on a flight from Seattle to Juneau.

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