At 27,000 ft. in the bright morning sky over Nevada last week, a swept-wing F-100F Super Sabre jet fighter-bomber on a training mission maneuvered through a series of turns. In the rear cockpit sat Lieut. Gerald Moran. 24. His vision was blocked by a cockpit hood; his only contacts with the outside were his radio and his instruments. In the front seat sat his instructor, Captain Thomas Coryell, 29, charged with keeping an alert for other aircraft while his student practiced. At 8:28. Pilot Moran called the control tower at Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas to report that he would now begin a "jet penetration," a procedural dive to 14.000 ft.; he headed down at about 280 knots.
At 21.000 ft., not far away, United Air Lines DC-7 Flight 736, with a crew of five and 42 passengers, sped along Airway Victor Eight, bound from Los Angeles for Denver at about 305 knots. The Civil Aeronautics Authority, controlling the airliner, had no knowledge of the jet; the Nellis A.F.B. tower, controlling the jet, knew nothing of the airliner. The jet, in penetrating the lower altitudes, had to break through the commercial airlane— as military aircraft do all the time. Only wild chance could bring the two planes together. It did.
From above, diving at a 45° angle, the Super Sabre struck the DC-7. its right wing slashing through the right wing of the airliner. United's pilot barked: "U.A.L. 736! Mid-air collision over Las Vegas! 736!" From the jet came the cry: "Mayday!"* Then, trailing smoke and fire, the planes dropped and crashed to the desert floor of wild flowers. All 47 in the DC-7, the two officers in the F-100F were killed.
The crash grimly underscored the stacks of longstanding complaints about the U.S.'s air traffic control systems: CAA and military ground control are poorly coordinated, wield separate authority over an overcrowded air space (11,000 planes fly the U.S. skies in any hour of the day), and CAA itself is badly understaffed and underequipped. "We cannot excuse the Government," said angered U.A.L. President William Allan Patterson, "for trying to solve a problem with divided authority and responsibility. I can only say that I hope the conscience of those in the Government agencies involved is as clear as I believe ours to be.''
*Voice code for the standard telegraphic SOS, "Mayday" (from the French m'aidez —help me) was first approved for international use in radiotelephony at the International Radiotelegraphic Convention in Washington in 1927.