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More than two hours passed before the first flotsam of disaster bobbed to the ocean surface. Then Coast Guardsmen began fishing out the remains: shreds of metal covered with flesh, a child's mitten, a blue snowsuit, a stewardess' jacket, a woman's mohair coat, a paperback copy of Call It Sleep, and—eventually—the body of a little boy. Part of the cockpit floated up, and when rescuers began to lift it out of the water, the headless body of a crew member flopped out into the water.
At week's end Federal Aviation Agency investigators said that when the Eastern and Pan Am planes passed, they were 1,200-1,700 ft. apart vertically, three to four miles laterally, a safe distance on anybody's scope. Yet distances can be deceptive in the air, and the investigators recognized the possibility that Carson might have swung his ship into a fatal fall because he believed a mid-air crash was imminent. The piston-driven plane was not equipped with the all but indestructible flight recorder, which indicates every yaw, pitch and twitch of the controls on U.S. jet airliners, and which probably would bear evidence of the cause of such an accident. No matter what the ocean bottom yields, the cause of Flight 663's plunge to the sea will not be known for weeks—if ever.