Death in Podolsk

On a stormy autumn night three years ago French peasants near the cathedral town of Beauvais stared in terror at a huge rain-drenched silver mass that lurched over their heads and into a nearby hillside. They heard three thunderous explosions, saw a gigantic blinding blaze. It was the end of Britain's ill-fated R-101, the end of Britain's hopes about lighter-than-air craft. For in that roaring hillside furnace burned the bones of most of the men who had fought for the dirigible program: Lord Christopher Birdwood Thomson, Secretary of State for Air; Sir William Sefton Brancker, Air Vice-Marshal and Director of Civil Aviation; the ship's designer; the man who superintended her construction; the commander of the R-34, first dirigible to fly the Atlantic; and 43 other passengers, officers, men.

Last week practically all of Russia's high air command was wiped out in a single crash near Podolsk 20 mi. south of Moscow. Where they were going, whence they came, what caused the crash, remained a Kremlin secret. But next day in the City Hall in downtown Moscow the bodies lay in state: Peter Baranov, Vice Commissar for Heavy Industries in charge of Aviation; Abram Goltsman, Chief of Civil Aviation; his assistant, A. Petrov; Valentine Zarzar, former Vice Chief of Civil Aviation and now Chief of the Aviation Section of the State Planning Commission; O. Gobonov, director of Plant No. 22, Russia's most important aviation factory; the plane's pilot, a mechanic and Comrade Baranov's wife.

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