Epitaph for Disaster

Dodging in and out of fluffy cumulus clouds, a Maryland Air National Guard T-33 jet trainer frisked around above the green valleys of Maryland and northern Virginia on a routine flight. In the cockpit was the pilot, Captain Julius R. McCoy, 34, of the Maryland Air National Guard, and his passenger Donald Chalmers, 26, Baltimore law student and National Guard Pfc., up on his first flight. At 8,500 ft. over western Maryland the T-Bird headed into a thin cloud in a steep right turn, slipped out of the cloud and sheared into the side of a Capital Airlines turboprop Viscount en route from Pittsburgh to Baltimore. Both planes spun to the ground. All seven passengers and four crew members of the Viscount were killed. So was Law Student Chalmers. The sole survivor was Jet Pilot McCoy, who somehow managed to parachute clear. "It happened when we were cruising in clear air," he said dazedly. "At no time did I see another plane. The next thing I knew there seemed to be an explosion."

Unprecedented Proclamation. The Maryland crash--the fifth mid-air military-airliner collision over the U.S. since mid-1949--laid on the line once again a scandalously serious problem of the U.S.'s crowded air space. In clear weather, military planes fly indiscriminately on and through civil airways under Visual Flight Rules. In areas of heavy traffic, civilian airliners, even in clear weather, more often fly under Instrument Flight Rules--continually tracked and controlled by Civil Aeronautics Administration ground stations. In the final analysis, the lack of military-civilian coordination was responsible for the Maryland crash just as it was responsible for the ramming of a United Air Lines DC-7 by an Air Force F-100F jet fighter-bomber over Las Vegas last month (TIME, May 5) and for many of the 2,833 near-misses on U.S. airways recorded by the Civil Aeronautics Board since May 1956.*

The newest crash threw official Washington into a fresh swivet of air-safety hearings and investigations. Out of it all, two days later, came an unprecedented stopgap presidential proclamation that 1) required military jet aircraft to fly by Instrument Flight Rules while in the civil airways below 25,000 ft.--later reduced to 20,000 ft., 2) prohibited jet penetration swoops from high to low altitudes through civil airways. Exception: emerency jet-bomber and fighter "scrambles," which would be continued whenever necessary for the national defense. Said the President's special assistant for aviation affairs, retired Air Force General Elwood ("Pete") Quesada: "We can have some of this in effect within a few days."

Boulevards & Tunnels. At best, these emergency steps seemed halfway measures, and they were. But Quesada and clamoring Congressmen knew that they are all and perhaps more than all that the obsolescent U.S. airways traffic-control system can absorb. CAA is now in the midst of a modernization program, has expanded personnel from 19.000 to 29,000 in three years, is training hundreds of new airways traffic controllers. The CAA's fiveyear, $1 billion program is due for completion in 1962--but the U.S. airways are in need of the 1962 program right now.

The fault lies not so much with the CAA as with Congress, which has, until lately, paid little attention to CAA cries of warning. Says Arizona's Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, a qualified Air Force Reserve jet pilot: "We've got to take the blame as much as anyone. We were repeatedly asked for money to modernize the airways and we repeatedly turned it down."

The long-term air safety goal: enforcement of Instrument Flight Rules over all U.S. aircraft in all of the crowded U.S. air space. Last week Arkansas' Democratic Representative Oren Harris introduced a bill to create a brand-new independent Federal Aviation Agency to set up and administer just that overall control. And Civil Aeronautics Administrator James Pyle, testifying before a Senate committee, envisaged a carving-up of U.S. air space with such features as skyway "boulevards" for coast-to-coast civilian jet transports, "tunnels" for military jet interceptors to swoop through.

Summed up Pyle, in what amounted to an epitaph to the Maryland crash: "Now we have the proper environment, a public-opinion climate, in which we can get our job done. We want to segregate the military jet traffic--gunnery, sonic booms, intercepts and aerobatics--and we will. We may have to bend airways here and there. We're going to put in a system that will work . .. And we'll beat our brains out to do it."

* One day after the Maryland crash last week, a second Capital Viscount radioed that an Air Force B-47 jet bomber had swept across its path in clear weather above Findlay, Ohio at 400 knots. Distance between Viscount and B-47: about 500 ft.

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