Tragedy in Jamaica Bay

It was ideal flying weather. The morning was dazzlingly clear, the ceiling and visibility unlimited, and a brisk, 20-mile-an-hour wind blew from the northwest. As New York waited to welcome Astronaut John Glenn, American Airlines' Flight One--nonstop to Los Angeles--screamed down the runway of International Airport at Idlewild, consuming a normal 5,000 feet of concrete before it left the ground in a perfect takeoff. Two minutes later, the flight of American One was over--and so were the lives of its 95 passengers and crew members. It was the worst tragedy involving a single plane in the history of U.S. commercial aviation.*

Giant, Shattered Fish. As soon as it was airborne, the giant and graceful Boeing 707-120B--the latest in jetliners and the pride of American Airlines--rose dramatically, boosted by its new turbofan engines. At about 700 feet the jet banked smoothly to the left in accordance with its flight plan, then veered sharply, almost rolled over completely--and plunged nose first into the tidal marshes of Jamaica Bay.

The passengers aboard an Albany-bound plane that took off immediately after the 707 saw the horrifying scene. "It happened as if something reached up from the earth, grabbed its nose and pulled it down," said Businessman Joseph F. Farano. The jet exploded, sending a geyser of water 200 feet into the air, followed by a plume of funereally black smoke. A minute after the crash, it lay like a giant, shattered fish just beneath the transparent waters of the bay, with scattered debris and flakes of aluminum skin glinting on the tufts of marshland. The only signs of life were clouds of wheeling sea gulls, roused from a nearby bird sanctuary, and a dozen helicopters that whirled to the scene like a swarm of dragonflies.

With it into the icy waters, American One took Oilman W. Alton Jones, 70, an intimate friend of ex-President Eisenhower, who was on his way to California to join Ike on a fishing excursion, retired Admiral Richard L. Conolly, president of Long Island University and two-time Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, Film Producer (The Guns of Navarone) Irving Rubine, and Millionaire Realtor Arnold Kirkeby, former head of the Kirkeby chain of luxury hotels./- Ironically, 17 passengers had transferred to American One at the last moment, when a United Air Lines flight was canceled. So shattered were the bodies that Chief Medical Examiner Milton Helpern ruled out visual identification by relatives as "inhumane," set out to distinguish them by fingerprints and other means.

Inherent Vice? While rescue workers were still combing the marshes for bodies, FAAdministrator Najeeb Halaby flew in from Washington with a team of experts to investigate the causes of the crash. There had been no indication of an explosion or fire in the air, and not a word of distress from Veteran (32 years) Pilot James T. S. Heist, 56. The 707s have previously flown millions of miles without a commercial-passenger fatality in the U.S. What had happened? The steering mechanism may have jammed when Pilot Heist started to turn the plane, or the jet may have been climbing too steeply to make a safe turn. Said Halaby: "It appears to have been some kind of mechanical failure in some part of the control system." Pilots theorized that the strict antinoise laws that force them to ascend rapidly after take-off and make perilous low-level maneuvers over heavily populated areas might have caused the crash of the huge jet. The Air Line Pilots Association has long argued that noise-abatement regulations were endangering flight safety.

There was speculation, too, about an inherent vice in all swept-wing jets--the tendency to yaw, or slip sidewise. Sometimes, in yawing, the jets nearly roll over in a frightening phenomenon pilots call the "Dutch roll"--and eyewitness reports suggested that American One might have done just that. Two of the four previous fatal 707 crashes were attributed to yaw (the fifth fatal 707 crash, of a Sabena Airlines plane in Belgium, killed 73 people last year, and has never been explained). But all of the four crashes occurred on training flights, when the Boeing 707 was deliberately put through a series of the most strenuous tests. Recently, the tendency to yaw has been minimized by tailfin improvements.

Whatever the cause of the tragedy, the answers might be stored in a large yellow sphere resembling a basketball: the shockproof automatic flight recorder carried by all jetliners to record moment-to-moment data on a plane's altitude, speed, gravity forces and direction. But after two days, the flight recorder of American One had not been found, and it may keep its secrets hidden forever in the muck of Jamaica Bay.

*The crash of a C124 Globemaster near Tokyo in 1953, killing 129 U.S. servicemen, was the world's worst single-plane disaster. The greatest catastrophe in aviation history occurred in 1960, when two airliners collided over New York, at a cost of 134 lives.

/-Also lost in the crash: 15 abstract paintings and drawings by the late Arshile Gorky (TIME, Feb. 23) that were en route to Los Angeles for an exhibition. Recovered from Alton Jones's effects: $55,690 in cash (including one $10,000 bill), another $7,000 in traveler's checks. Business associates of the free-spending Jones were not surprised.

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