Death in Ecuador

Death in Equador

An aviator before and during the World War, Fritz Wilhelm Hammer in the years that followed made for himself a place in German civil aviation equivalent to that occupied by the late Captain Ed Musick in the U. S. In South America he established and flew lines in Brazil and Ecuador. When Dornier needed a pilot for its mammoth DO-X, Fritz Hammer was recalled to take the great twelve-motor airplane on its long transatlantic trips. Last week from the rocky Cordilleras came the details of 49-year-old Captain Hammer's last flight.

With three companions he took off from Guayaquil, Ecuador, rose 12,500 ft. to skim the bare mountain hump en route to Quito. Had Fritz Hammer climbed 15 ft. higher he would have cleared the granite peak. Instead he and his companions crashed to death. When found, the plane was strewn over half a mile of mountainside, the four bodies were 200 yards apart, all stripped naked by Indians.

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