Crackdown

The setting was tragically familiar. At 3:33 a.m., the pilot of a twin-engine transport plane arriving from New York radioed that he was lost in a thick haze somewhere near Los Angeles. At 3:54, as the pilot began feeling his way down through the haze, the plane caught one wing tip on the crest of a slope, and plunged into a hillside in suburban Whittier Heights. The crew of three and all 26 passengers aboard were killed. The plane was a war-surplus C46 Curtiss Commando, operated by a nonscheduled carrier--the fourth non-sked C46 to crash in four months.

In Washington, the Civil Aeronautics Administration hastily ordered the plane's operator, North Continent Airlines, to cease operations immediately. They admitted that the operators had been under investigation for a year, charged with a raft of safety violations. With a strange sense of leniency, the civil air authorities had allowed the line to stay in business pending an official hearing.

Last week's crash also precipitated action against the nation's other 51 non-sked operators. Washington drastically tightened up their operating regulations, e.g., tougher pilot qualifications, better maintenance. In view of the fact that the non-skeds carried 586,952 passengers in 1951 alone, the crackdown was plainly long overdue.

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