On the floor of a cavernous hangar at New York's Idlewild Airport, the ghost of a dead jetliner is slowly taking shape.
Around small cardboard signs reading "Right Wing," "Left Wing" and "Tail," a group of purposeful experts are arranging what is left of the American Airlines' Boeing 707 that crashed on take-off into Jamaica Bay, killing all 95 aboard (TIME. March 9).
Last week, as police recovered the last of the bodies (all but one have been found), the most vital piece of wreckage was dredged from nine feet of water—the 7O7s flight recorder, a basketball-sized sphere containing important information on the plane's flight path. The rest of the pieces—shattered engines, crumpled spars, smashed pumps and instrument panels—are not much larger.
The biggest chunk is an 8-ft. by 10-ft. section of the tail. Yet the skilled crash detectives of the U.S. Government's Civil Aeronautics Board can identify and check every tiny fragment. Out of the grim jigsaw puzzle, they will slowly and carefully extract the "probable cause" of the accident. Then other 707s, forewarned and perhaps modified, may be saved from making plunging turns into disaster.
The CAB is a small, independent agency created by Congress and charged, among other things, with watching over air safety. It has no connection with the powerful Federal Aviation Agency, which runs the airways and must, in fact, answer for its performance to CAB. Every accident of an aircraft weighing more than 12,500 lbs.
—and every fatal accident of any aircraft—is exhaustively investigated by the CAB's 171-man Bureau of Safety, which employs experts on practically everything having to do with flying. If even more expertise is needed, the bureau is empowered by law to call for help from all Government agencies, including the armed services, the Bureau of Standards and the FBI. Its technical detectives do not always "get their man." Yet, in the last ten years CAB has found the probable cause in 96% of all cases investigated.
Off the Radar. On the morning of the Idlewild crash, former Pilot George A. Van Epps, the bureau's northeastern chief, with headquarters at Idlewild, got a phone call from the tower: "This is an alert.
An American Airlines jet on take-off has dropped from the radar departure scope." Van Epps's first move was to call police to guard the wreckage from ghoulish souvenir hunters. Minutes later, he was over the wreck in a helicopter. By midafternoon, a specialist team from Washington had arrived to help, and a full-scale investigation was well under way.
When a big airplane crashes and the wreckage is badly chewed up, everyone goes to work—the plane and engine makers, the airline involved, representatives of the pilots' and engineers' unions. The CAB assigns eight groups of specialists to cover every phase of the flight. The structure is analyzed to see whether the plane was on fire before or after it hit.