Transport: Ceiling Zero

At Kansas City the TWA dispatcher advised his line’s famed Douglas Sky Chief, eastbound from Los Angeles, to try a landing at an emergency field 135 mi. to the north. For more than an hour Pilot Harvey Bolton cruised over Missouri, his radio transmitter dead, looking for a “hole” in the thick fog. His fuel was almost gone when, about 4 a.m., Pilot Bolton roused his eleven passengers with a shout of “Buckle your belts tight!” and nosed down for a blind landing.

The big transport picked its way between a farmhouse and a barn near Atlanta, Mo., struck a fence, crashed heavily into a road embankment, turned over. Crushed to death were Pilot Bolton. Co-Pilot Kenneth Greeson, New Mexico’s millionaire-Senator Bronson Cutting, a 20-year-old girl—sister of the TWA radio dispatcher who had been directing the plane. Injured were a mother and baby, the wife of a TWA pilot, five Hollywood cinemen and the wife of one, who died next day.

That afternoon in Washington, Senators wept openly and a Congressional recess was declared. Same day Manhattan newspapers carried display advertising of a “new, faster Sky Chief,” pictures of another TWAirliner which last week flew from Los Angeles to New York non-stop in 11 hr. 5 min., broke the transcontinental transport record by half an hour. First Douglas to crack up in the U. S., Sky Chief’s misfortune seemed clearly due to weather, not construction.