With the explosive growth of air travel in the 1950s, the air industry has worked ceaselessly and effectively to make flying safer. But despite every safety precaution, despite every improvement in equipment and procedure, there remains one peril that is a nightmare to all airline men: the possibility of someone, acting out of dementia, desperation or despair, planting a bomb aboard an airplane. In the past decade at least eight planes around the world have been so sabotaged —and at least 99 people died as a result. Last week U.S. authorities were deep in investigations of two more possible bombings aloft.
"The Richest Woman." Piecing together the fragments of a National Airlines DC-6B that crashed last fortnight, killing 34, in North Carolina (TIME, Jan. 18), Civil Aeronautics Board investigators found strong evidence indicating a bomb explosion inside the plane. The wreckage showed that an 8-ft. section near a forward washroom had been blasted outward, as if by an explosion within the plane. A small blue handbag, its bottom blown out, was found near the crash scene. Searching through the passenger list for a possible suspect, the probers turned up the name of one Julian Andrew Frank, 32.
The reason for the investigators' interest in Frank was the discovery that within two months before the crash he had taken out some $900,000 in life and accident insurance, naming his ex-model wife as beneficiary. And as they looked deeper into Frank's affairs, they found that he might well have reason for wanting to die: he was a young man in trouble.
Handsome, wavy-haired Julian Frank was a lawyer. He lived with his beautiful wife and two small children in exurbanite Westport, Conn., commuted to his small office in Manhattan. Fellow commuters recall that he was a first-rate bridge player but a loud, boastful sort of fellow (says one acquaintance: "He gave me the impression of being a young man in a hurry—ambitious, driving, smart"). Others remember that he often talked of dreaming that he would some day die in a plane crash.
Up to last year, Julian Frank had earned about $10,000 a year. Then he seemed to have struck it rich: he bragged of making $14,000 a month, moved out of his $20,000 home into a $45,000 house, talked almost casually of having "dropped $600,000 in the stock market." He also began taking out his huge insurance policies. "If I die," he told friends, "my wife will be the richest woman in the world."