EGYPT: Interrupted Routine

Clear skies ahead, and an airline record of 228,580,804 miles flown without accident, helped make the Cairo take-off of Trans World Airlines’ Flight No. 903, Bombay to New York via Rome, a routine matter. With no indication of trouble ahead, Veteran Pilot Walton Webb took the big Constellation Star of Maryland off Farouk Field just before dawn and headed northwest.

Hours later the crew of another plane spotted her burned-out wreckage scattered over a narrow-gauge railway on the desert sands 55 miles northwest of Cairo.

No passenger or crewman had survived to give evidence. Most of them burned beyond recognition, 55 men, women & children, including Egyptian Screen Star Camellia (Lilliane Cohen), “the Lana Turner of the East,” and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s able Dean Everett Moore Baker, had died.