Trophy & Tragedy

In Washington last week Juan Terry Trippe, affable, granitic president of Pan American Airways, received from the hands of President Roosevelt the bronze certificate of award of the Collier Trophy, bestowed every year for distinguished service to aviation. The trophy itself, a lush piece of statuary two feet high, stood on the President's desk. The National Aeronautic Association, which decides each year's winner, awarded the trophy this year to Pan American Airways for "establishment of the trans-Pacific airline and the successful execution of extended over-water navigation and the regular navigation thereof." Trumpeted Collier's, whose late Publisher Robert Collier established the trophy 26 years ago: "In no other year has the opinion of the industry been unanimous, as now, that a different selection would have been inane. The scheduling of the Pacific Ocean . . . was perhaps the most spectacular, most challenging day in transportation history."

Juan Trippe's triumphal day was somewhat marred by the wreck of a Pan American-Grace Airways transport which occurred in the sea off Panama four days earlier, snuffing out 14 lives (TIME, Aug. 9). Pan American spokesmen hastened to point out that the wrecked plane was not one of the famed Clippers, which are flying boats, but an amphibian; and that Pan American and Pan American-Grace are separate airlines, although P.A.A.owns 50% of P.A.G. stock. P.A.A.'s safety record with its Clippers is almost perfect: only three deaths are charged against it. That accident occurred last year when a Clipper sideswiped a launch while taking off from Trinidad's Port-of-Spain harbor, filled with water (TIME, April 20, 1936). Even that mishap was more like a collision between surface craft than the sort of accident that commonly befalls airplanes. The record of P.A.G., which flies the difficult South American overland routes, is less excellent but still good: 32 lives have been lost in nine years of operation covering 40,000,000 passenger miles.

The wrecked amphibian was a Sikorsky S-43, weighed 19,000 lb., had a passenger capacity of 15. A fleet of Navy craft searching the accident area last week found packages of mail, life preservers, cushions, a rug, a container of ice cream. The mail was dried out in a Cristobal bakeshop, forwarded by plane. Small fragments of the Sikorsky scattered over a wide area led P.A.G. officials to believe that it struck the sea at high speed. No bodies were recovered. The passenger list made public last week disclosed that among the victims were two well-known Bureau of Air Commerce executives, Rex Martin and Garnett Quims Caldwell.

The Sikorsky had come up from Santiago, making a land stop at Guayaquil (Ecuador), a water stop at Tumaco (Colombia), heading for its final land stop at Cristobal in the Canal Zone. Pilot Stephen Dunn, Wartime Navy flyer and six-year veteran on P.A.G. runs, approached the field through thick cloud and heavy rain, passed over the zone of silence extending straight up from the field's radio beacon, radioed that he was backtracking to make a landing. It seemed most likely that while he was spiraling down, the sea loomed up at him too suddenly through the murk to escape a crash.

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