Crowded Sky

As soon as it hit the forward fuselage of the three-jet Boeing 727, the twin-engined Cessna disintegrated in a yellow fireball. For a few seconds, the bigger plane looked like a wounded quail struggling for control. Then, still airborne, it too exploded, raining debris over a mile-and-a-half area near Hendersonville, N.C. "I could see bodies falling like confetti," said a witness. One crashed through the roof of a house. Another fell in a filling station, others on highways and trees. Miraculously, no one on the ground was injured. But all 82 people aboard the two planes died--including Navy Secretary-designate John McNaughton, 45.

McNaughton and his wife Sally, 46, were in the Blue Ridge resort area to pick up their son Theodore, 11, at a nearby camp. A former Harvard law professor and one of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's "whiz kids" in 1961, McNaughton was to have been sworn in as Navy Secretary this week.

Before the wreckage of the fallen planes had stopped smoldering, John Reed, director of the National Transportation Safety Board, led a team of 68 investigators to the scene. Why was the private plane, carrying two Springfield, Mo., businessmen and flown by Veteran Pilot David Addison of Lebanon, Mo., twelve miles off course at the time of the collision? When Addi son reached a point southeast of the Asheville-Hendersonville Airport, he had been instructed to turn north, then report in for final landing instructions.

Addison acknowledged the message, but never made the northward turn-whether for lack of time, out of misunderstanding of the instruction, or because of a mechanical malfunction may never be known. When the collision occurred, at one minute after noon, the Piedmont Airlines plane, which had just left the airport, was climbing right on course.

In the past eleven years, a total of 199 U.S. mid-air collisions have taken 669 lives. With the number of private aircraft now at 104,000, compared with 83,000 five years ago, commercial airports are so congested that some Congressmen have proposed banning the private planes from commercial-liner airports altogether. The House Commerce Committee scheduled air-traffic hearings for this week as a result of the Hendersonville tragedy.

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