What Did Matter

The No. 3 and No. 4 engines were out, and the No. 1 engine was beginning to lose power. Coming in for an emergency landing, the pilot discovered that the nose wheel was not locked down into place. He pulled up the laboring Constellation, began to circle for another approach--and smashed into a swampy wood outside Richmond, Va. The crash and fire last week killed 74 Army recruits who were being flown to Fort Jackson, S.C., and touched off bitter criticism of the Army's system of transporting troops.

The Constellation that went down last week was no Government-owned plane. It belonged to Imperial Airlines, a "nonsked" outfit with a "fleet" of four planes. The Army got hooked up with Imperial by a dismal series of events. By law--as enacted by Congress under pressure from commercial air companies--the Army and the other services are forbidden to transport troops by military aircraft in the continental U.S. on the theory that the airlines need the business. The law also permits nonscheduled airlines such as Imperial to bid for service contracts and because the penny-skimping nonskeds can generally underbid the bigger airlines, they usually get the contracts. Eleven of the nation's nonskeds get the bulk of their business from carrying troops.

Thus, under the regulations, it did not matter last week that the Army does not like to use the nonskeds, or that a Pentagon investigation of the performance records of 23 companies--including Imperial --was in the works. It did not matter that the Civil Aeronautics Board was about to investigate Imperial. It did not matter that in 1953 a DC-3 owned by the company (then known as Regina Cargo Airlines) crashed near Centralia, Wash., and killed 19 soldiers. It did not matter that the Federal Aviation Agency fined Imperial $1,000 in 1959 for flying 30 marines in an "unairworthy" C-46. It did not matter that the Constellation, built in 1946, was one of the oldest of its class still in the air. What did matter last week was that Imperial satisfied FAA safety regulations and qualified for the job.

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