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Less than 24 hours after the Star of Cairo took off from Paris, a party of marines reached a snowy peak in California's Laguna Mountains. There, among a litter of wrecked engines, with gaily wrapped Christmas packages amidst the twisted metal, they found what they had come for—the bodies of nine passengers and three crew members of Western Airlines Flight 44—El Centre to San Diego.
On Christmas Eve, Pilot George B. Sprada had radioed that he was at 7,000 feet and could see the San Diego field 60 miles away in the sparkling clear night. A few minutes later, ranchers saw a flame on the mountain top. Then the weather closed in. It was three days later that a cowboy came upon what was left.
The holiday crashes were not over. The dead were still being brought down from the California mountain, and carried across Eire's Fergus River when the Chicago radio tower received an urgent message. American Airlines pilot Frank Hamm Jr., on top of the overcast en route from Buffalo to Chicago, had failing engines, would have to land on whatever was handy when he came down out of the cloud. He came out above the shore of Lake Michigan, headed for the Michigan City (Ind.) airport only about 40 miles from Chicago's municipal field. But there was not enough altitude left to make the emergency field.
Pilot Hamm headed for the clearest space he could find, brushed through a grove of trees on the way. The DC-3 burst into pieces at the crash. Somehow, the stewardess and 18 passengers escaped with their lives. But Pilot Hamm and his copilot, Harmon E. Ring, had made their last flight.
Over Shanghai's airfields on Christmas night the fog rolled, and China's budding air transport system had a situation it was not qualified to meet. One incoming airline pilot had no experience with G.C.A. (ground-controlled approach, the modern homing system which U.S. airlines still hope to get). Two others tried to work out their approach problems on ill-maintained radio sets, which failed them. Result: all three crashed, in the worst disaster in the history of commercial aviation. Injured, 18; dead, 70.