Inquest No. 1

For years the Department of Commerce has conducted private investigations of fatal airplane crashes, kept its findings secret to protect airlines from adverse publicity. Year ago Air Commerce Director Eugene Luther Vidal got Federal regulations amended to make publication of reports on fatal airplane accidents mandatory (TIME, July 2).

Since then reports on a few minor crashes have dribbled into the U. S. Press, attracted little attention. Last month TWA's Sky Chief, en route from Los Angeles to Kansas City, cracked up in a Missouri fog, killed both its pilots, three of its eleven passengers including U. S. Senator Bronson Cutting (TIME, May 13). Unable to land at Kansas City because of fog, the plane had proceeded toward a Department of Commerce emergency landing field at Kirksville, Mo., 128 mi. away. About 16 mi. from Kirksville, with only 27 minutes of fuel left, the pilot came down through the fog, flew low over rolling country apparently seeking Kirksville .When he made a turn too close to the ground, a wingtip hit, catapulted the plane into a roadbank.

Last week Secretary of Commerce Roper made public his Department's report on the accident. Based on two weeks of hearings in which 59 witnesses filled 907 pages of testimony, the report blamed the crash principally on bad weather and inaccurate weather reporting by government and company meteorologists, found TWA guilty of five "inexcusable violations" of Federal airline regulations for which it may be fined a maximum of $2,500--the first such fine in U. S. airline history.

TWA's 33-year-old President Jack Frye flared up with a blunt statement squarely laying blame for the crash not on TWA but on the Department of Commerce. Said he: "The real cause of the accident was that Pilot Bolton attempted to come down through a ceiling reported by the Bureau of Air Commerce observer at Kirksville as 7,000 ft. ... What he actually found was practically a zero-zero condition. . . . The accident occurred . . . solely because the favorable landing conditions reported by the observer at Kirksville did not exist."

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