Grounded

The big DC-6 American Airliner, with 25 aboard, had just passed over Gallup, New Mexico when the fire broke out. Pilot Evan Chatfield swung back for the field at Gallup, praying for time to make it. He did. Fire trucks quickly snuffed out the blaze. The damage was small--only a foot-square hole in the plane. But the near-catastrophe frightened the airlines.

It was the second fire aboard a DC-6 in three weeks--and both had started near the gasoline-burning heater under the cabin floor. The other plane, a United ship, with 52 aboard, had crashed (TIME, Nov. 3), with no survivors. But the Civil Aeronautics Board had seen enough to order the magnesium emergency landing flares taken out of all DC-6s--a step the lines themselves had long advocated. In the second fire, the airliner may have been saved by the fact that it had no flares to add to the fire.

Action. Eleven hours after the Gallup fire, American Airlines' Board Chairman Cyrus Rowlett Smith ordered American's 35 DC-6s grounded "until we know" the reason for the fires. Shortly after, United Air Lines' President W. A. Patterson grounded United's 34 DC-6s. President Truman's own Independence, a DC-6, came under the quarantine.

Donald W. Douglas, whose Douglas Aircraft Co. had poured $13,400,000 of engineering and research and $1,500,000 of testing into the DC-6, concurred. Until the trouble was found, said Douglas, "all further passenger flying in these airplanes should be discontinued." It was the first time that a whole line of transport planes (there were 75 in service) had been grounded without a governmental order.

Estimate. As investigators went over the Gallup plane, suspicion at first centered on the heating system. The Sixes have had trouble recently when both the heating and pressurizing systems were working. But tests showed no fault in the heater. Investigators suspected another cause. This was that gasoline, overflowing from the wing tanks, had caught fire as it was vented under the fuselage just forward of the heater air intake. If that proved to be the case, Douglas estimated that modifications could be made in a short time. But the Sixes would stay on the ground until CAB and Douglas were sure they had eliminated the cause.

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