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On the ground, hundreds had seen the explosion and fire that shook the plane as it climbed off the runway. Rancher Deloss Wilder, who had put his newlywed daughter and son-in-law aboard for a Hawaiian honeymoon, watched the takeoff in horror. "Fire broke out," he said. "Things started falling off—the engine, the wing tip. The plane was still on fire when it disappeared through the pass. I thought it had gone down. It was a terrible thing. The wing just kept getting shorter." Miraculously, neither the engine nor the wing section struck anyone on the ground. The engine landed in a San Bruno carpentry shop, narrowly missing three workers; the burning 27-ft. by 6-ft. piece of wing fell in the yard of a South San Francisco house.
"Enough Trouble Already." "In an emergency in an airplane," Kimes said later, "the worst thing you can do is make quick decisions unless you have to." For a moment the thought of ditching in the Pacific crossed his mind. But by this time he was maintaining altitude at nearly 1,200 ft. and, as he recalled, "I figured we had enough trouble already without risking a dunking."
Resisting the temptation to turn immediately back to San Francisco International, Kimes decided to head instead for Travis Air Force Base, some 40 miles to the southwest, which had a longer runway (11,000 ft. v. 9,700 ft. at San Francisco International). As gently as possible, he put the plane into a right turn and headed inland over Golden Gate Bridge. For the first time since takeoff ("I waited until I was fairly sure we could stay in the air"), Kimes spoke to his passengers over the plane's intercom system. Said he: "We have a minor problem, ladies and gentlemen. Well, maybe it's not so minor."
The passengers, many of whom had seen the 6,083-lb. outboard engine drop off, already knew that the problem was not so minor. Their first inkling of trouble came right after takeoff when someone yelled: "Look, the wing is on fire!" Mrs. William Richmond, who was filming the takeoff from her right-window seat over the wing, kept right on shooting as the wing erupted in flames. A few rows behind her, James Krick aimed his still camera at the disintegrating wing. Others were not so calm. The four-and six-year-old daughters of Kaleo Schroder, a Richmond, Calif., schoolteacher, burst into frightened tears. Two older women became hysterical. Minoru Fujioka, a civilian worker at Pearl Harbor who was on the way home after enrolling his son in the Air Force Academy, prayed "for the first time in my life."