Eight Minutes to Doom

It was 27 minutes past noon; the bright summer sky was partly covered with clouds. Flight 624 of United Air Lines, nine hours out of Los Angeles and two hours east of Chicago, was purring sweetly at 17,000 feet over ridge-ribbed central Pennsylvania. In his four-engined 300-m.p.h. DC-6, Veteran Pilot George Warner Jr. received his clearance from the traffic-control tower at New York City's La Guardia Field--meaning that he could let down gradually in the next 230 miles for his approach to New York.

Eight thousand feet below, Pilot Earl Bach, plugging along toward Philadelphia in a DC-3, heard the radio exchange. At 12:33 Pilot Bach's ears were stung by another message from Pilot Warner. It was terse: "New York, New York, this is an emergency descent." Said Bach: "I could tell from the pilot's voice that they were in bad trouble."

Whatever the trouble was, Pilot Warner knew it was bad too. It let him, his copilot, his 39 passengers and two stewardesses live just eight minutes longer. When the trouble struck, the DC-6 was not far from Sunbury. Minutes later, down to 900 feet, it was plunging through a valley, skimming a mountain, and apparently heading for a small airport at Shamokin. The runway was not long enough to take his 70,000-lb. ship, but the pilot might have risked a belly landing. Flyers there could not figure it out; the big plane's motors sounded all right and they saw no smoke or fire.

Seconds before the crash, the DC-6 roared 100 feet over the floor of a narrow valley near Mt. Carmel. It was heading into a coal mine's tall breaker building. Then it veered--and the next instant there was no more plane. It rammed a 66,000-volt transformer and disintegrated in a flash of flame. It was 1948's worst airline disaster, and the fourth worst in U.S. domestic airline history.

What had caused the awful trouble aboard Flight 624 might never be known. There was no survivor; parts of bodies were found 450 feet from the crash.* The Civil Aeronautics Board's investigators had almost nothing to go on. Some witnesses at the scene said at first that the plane had been trailing smoke; then they were not so sure. All that was left of the plane were a few large hunks of engines, a few propeller blades, some jagged chunks of fuselage.

*Among the victims: Hollywood's 55 -year-old girl-show producer, Earl Carroll (see MILESTONES); fortyish, brunette Beryl Wallace, star of many of his revues; onetime Follies Girl Venita Varden, divorced wife of Jack Oakie.

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