Death on the Ground

When the year's fatalities in aviation are reckoned up it will be found that two of the deadliest crashes of 1933 obliterated 15 persons who, in all likelihood, had never been in an airplane in their lives. Last spring a transport plane carrying a pilot and two passengers into Oakland, Calif. crashed into a suburban cottage, set it afire, burned ten groundlings to death (TIME, April 3). Last week Lieut. George R. Johnson, an aerial photographer whose discoveries in the high Andes of Peru were world famed, took off from Red Bank, N. J. with an observer in a National Guard plane. Something went wrong with the engine. The plane fell out of control, crashed through a two-story house. The fuel tank exploded, flooding the house with flaming gasoline. Five negroes, including two small children, who were sitting around the dining room table, died in flames with the airmen.

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