The Ache & the Argument

The breakfast-table news about air disasters is achingly familiar. A plane was taking off--or perhaps landing. Some of the passengers, to be sure, were nervous; some always are, no matter how normal conditions may seem. Then, in the merest, most explosive instant of time, came death from flame and mangled metal.

So it was last week with an Eastern Air Lines DC-7 bound from Charlotte, N.C., to New York's Idlewild airport. Idlewild was blanketed by dense fog, and the plane circled above the field for 30 minutes before it got clearance to make an instrument landing. Just as it was touching down, it veered to the right. A wingtip struck the ground, and the eerie, fog-shrouded night came ablaze. Emergency crews were on the spot within minutes, festooning the wreckage with fire-extinguishing foam. Of 46 passengers and five crew members, 26 survived--and 25 died.

It was far from being the worst aviation disaster in U.S. history. But in a certain sense it was one of the most ironic--for among those killed was Captain Edward J. Bechtold, 43, a veteran Eastern pilot who was a recognized expert on air safety.

Bechtold was a member of the Air Traffic Control Committee of the Air Line Pilots Association, chairman of the New York Air Safety Committee.

Writing for Airlift magazine, Bechtold recently complained that the Federal Aviation Agency has ignored pilot recommendations for new landing aids at Idlewild. "Our margins," he wrote prophetically, "are woefully thin now." Bechtold had often criticized Idlewild's facilities.

And in dying, he proved his point. The field's Precision Approach Radar had been unusable since Nov. 13 because tower control facilities were being renovated.

Bechtold was therefore forced to use the Instrument Landing System alone.

The Human Element. The Idlewild crash was the seventh in a week, and it caused an increase in the already considerable amount of talk and argument about air safety.

By the favorite measurement of the commercial airlines--deaths per passenger mile--air travel remains much safer than automobile travel. But William A. Patterson, the outspoken president of United Air Lines, has much that is discomforting to say about air safety. He argues that airlines may be overcrowding planes in their scramble for revenues, resulting in chaos in the rush for emergency exits when accidents do occur. Others point out that such overloading encourages dangerously high take-off and landing speeds.

Even the most confident air travelers must have felt a bit queasy during recent testimony before a congressional committee that airline pilots read magazines, played cards and lallygagged with stewardesses while in flight.* Says R. L. Loesch, flight test chief for Boeing Airplane Co.: "Most crashes are caused by the human element ... the inability of the crew to react to an emergency." Whatever the cause, the chilling fact remained that in a single week 211 persons, including 65 Americans, had died in seven major air crashes around the world. Among them:

> In Lima, Peru, where low-hanging clouds are a constant fret to pilots, the skies were encouragingly clear when a Boeing 707 flight of Brazil's Varig Airlines approached from Rio de Janeiro. Carrying a crew of 17 and 80 passengers, it swung out over the ocean, circling to lose altitude for landing, blinked its landing lights in a traditional "all's well" greeting to a passing Air France jet. Minutes later it smashed into the 2,400-ft. Las Cruces hill and burst into flames. All were killed, including 18 Americans. For Varig the crash marred an enviable record of 25 years' service without a fatal accident. The pilot had taken his plane three miles too far to the east during his circling maneuver, and the crash had been inevitable. Whether it was his own error or that of faulty navigation equipment, no one could say.

> A small private plane collided with a two-engine Scandia transport flown by Brazil's Vasp Airlines in the crowded air corridor between Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. All 27 aboard both planes were killed, their bodies strewn along more than two miles of rugged mountain terrain. The smaller plane's pilot had strayed into a lane reserved for scheduled commercial airliners.

> A United Air Lines flight approaching Washington crashed, killing all 17 persons aboard. The CAB named as probable cause two 11-to-14-lb. whistling swans.

The swans, headed south from the Arctic to Chesapeake Bay wintering grounds, apparently struck the stabilizer of the United Viscount "like soft cannonballs," said a CAB crash investigator. Weakened by the impact, the tail shuddered and tore away, and the plane fell out of control.

But fate has odd ways. And so, in Windsor Locks, Conn., Pilot Clifford C.

Albertson, 46, last week landed his Mohawk Airlines' twin-engined Convair smoothly and watched his 21 passengers debark. Then Albertson strolled to the terminal building--where he fell dead of a heart attack. His passengers could only count their blessings--and wonder what would have happened if Albertson had been stricken a few minutes earlier.

*The Federal Aviation Agency announced last week that it had fined four Eastern Air Lines pilots $300 each for such extracurricular activities.

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