Bad Land

Since Sitting Bull ambushed Custer by the Little Big Horn in 1876, Montana has had few major disturbances. But this year Montana's jutting peaks and high, scarred badlands, from Custer Creek to Hell Gate Canyon, have been acting up. Last January a Northwest Airlines Lockheed Zephyr shook off part of its tail structure, plummeted into Bridger Canyon, bringing ten persons to death. Last month the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific's Olympian dived through a trestle into Custer Creek during a cloudburst, killing and drowning 47. Following week the Olympian ran through orders near Roundup, hit a trainload of CCC boys head on, killed one. Then, one morning last week, disaster struck twice again on Montana's tortuous stretches.

P: Eastbound from Missoula, a huge Northern Pacific freight locomotive, with 75 cars behind and a hundred hoboes riding, blew up in Hell Gate Canyon with the mightiest roar Montana has heard since Paul Bunyan passed by. Dead when help came were the engineer, the fireman, the brakeman, two hoboes. So shattered was the engine that railway officials despaired of determining just what had happened. But in the Northern Pacific offices at Philadelphia, 2,000 miles away, there had lain for weeks a document containing a fantastically possible answer: two typewritten pages reporting a conversation overheard on the Camden-Philadelphia ferry. Three men had been furtively plotting. Their plot: to blow up a Northern Pacific locomotive.

P: Into Billings from Seattle at 2:15 the same morning as the train explosion sailed Northwest Airlines Flight Four, a fast, ten-passenger Lockheed Zephyr transport airplane of the same type as that which crashed in Bridger Canyon six months before. After the Bridger Canyon crash, all such Lockheeds were ordered grounded for correction of an apparently faulty tail surface detail. The man who ordered that grounding was Bureau of Air Commerce Inspector A. L. Niemeyer. Later, all the Lockheed Zephyrs were satisfactorily corrected, were actively in the air again. Last week Inspector Niemeyer himself flew into Billings along with seven other passengers in Flight Four's ten reclining seats. At 2:53 Flight Four taxied out the runway for its take-off for Chicago. As passengers sleepily groped for their safety belts the ship took off. Up it went to 100 feet, then. drunkenly, it began to topple to earth. both motors roaring behind up-to-date full-feathering propellers. Queerly it hit, tail and left wing tip scraping the ground first, 1,000 yards beyond the airport. Like a flash experienced Pilot Walter Bullock cut his master switch to prevent fire. For 200 feet the ship furrowed along, straight for a 75-foot canyon, then hit a scrub oak, swung around and stopped. All the passengers but one sat strapped in their seats, bewildered, stunned, but alive. The eighth passenger, a woman, was hurled clear, died an hour later in a Billings hospital. Pilot Bullock, shaken but unhurt, was amazed. "It just didn't seem to pick up, once we got in the air," he said.

Few air-transport crashes have ever left so many live witnesses. But this did not solve the mystery. Had a cable parted? Had the tail structure failed again? Had some treacherous atmospheric lasso twisted up from the gullied Montana slopes to haul Flight Four to earth? To these and other questions, Inspector Niemeyer was at week's end seeking the answers.

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