Plane Finder

On March 1, a Transcontinental & Western Air passenger plane took off from San Francisco, flew into a storm, disappeared. Three months later, Prospector H. O. Collier came upon its wreckage, strewn over a Sierra Nevada mountainside. The plane had been smashed to bits, but its tail had caught in a tree, hung high as a dead goose. The weeks of fruitless search for this and other lost planes have piled added horror on the original disaster, added worry and heavy expense for airline operators.

Pan American Airways' Los Angeles Operations Manager Major Daniel E. Ellis had an idea, took it to California Institute of Technology's young Research Physicist Anthony Easton. Last week, Researcher Easton finished his job: the design for an automatic distress signal. The apparatus is a two-tube, five-meter radio sending set, cased against fire in two inches of asbestos, housed in the plane's tail, spring-mounted against shocks. Its short antenna is a streamlined metal rod running from the fuselage along the leading edge of the plane's vertical stabilizer. Designer Easton chose to set his radio in the tail because he remembered the TWA crash, knew that a plane's tail, having little mass, is seldom demolished in crashes.

The radio's automatic switch is a pendulum which swings fore and aft. A heavy jolt swings it forward into its lock, starts the set sending its mechanical cry for help. Operated by storage batteries, the small transmitter repeats its call steadily for two or three days, is audible to radio direction finders in searching rescue planes. If a safe but bumpy landing should put the signal into operation, a red light on his instrument board warns a pilot to release the pendulum switch.

Inventor Easton, who has had experience making sets for the U. S. Weather Bureau, expects his radios to survive even violent crashes. His Weather Bureau sets are sent up in balloons, are often in operating condition even after falling from great heights. A slender, blond young Englishman who went to the U. S. in 1930, Physicist Easton enrolled at Caltech two years ago to take his Master's degree, is now working for his Ph.D. To date he has built no working model of his design. Said he: "There is no reason to build a working model. Any radio man in the country could do it easily. There is nothing to test because the only way to test it is to crack up a ship."

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