A Star Goes Down

Her throttles wide open, the Star of the East, a DC-4 of Pan American World Airways' Cuban affiliate Aviacion Cubana, roared northeastward out of Bermuda's Kindley Field before dawn one day last week. Just after the takeoff, one of the four engines of the Madrid-to-Havana plane faltered. "I was just going to run to the front of the cabin and warn the passengers when we hit the water," Steward Orlando Lopez Suarez later recalled. "The tail broke off ... I found a rubber dinghy, but it was punctured and would not inflate . . . then the plane sank and I guess the other people sank because they had their seat belts fastened."

A Bermuda pilot boat, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Yakutat and a Kindley base crash boat raced out through whitecaps, pulled four survivors (including the steward) from the edge of a circle of burning gasoline 500 yards across; 37 others were drowned or burned to death.

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