Flight 6, Crash 4

Around 4 o'clock in the morning, T. W. A.'s transcontinental Flight 6, eastbound from Kansas City, was over the Missouri River just west of Lambert-St. Louis Field. A few minutes before, the airport radio had given veteran Pilot P. T. W. Scott the St. Louis weather. The ceiling was down to the bare CAA minimum: 400 feet. There were scattered clouds at 200, visibility was two miles. Wind: north northeast 6 (miles an hour). With eleven passengers behind in berths and seats, Captain Scott and his co-pilot had a job on their hands that has long since ceased to worry good airmen: an instrument landing.

It was drizzling on the ground and the neon lights on the hangar roofs were haloed in mist when Flight 6 rumbled overhead toward the radio range. The sound of her engines died in the clouds. East of the field Pilot Scott made his turn, headed west, letting down along the beam. From the tower the operators saw Flight 6 break out over the red neon-light "ladder" marking the end of Run way No. 1 (east-west). Pilot Scott was a little high, perhaps by miscalculation, perhaps by design. Flight 6, down to around 300 feet, zipped west over the runway, made a gentle turn to the left. It looked as if Scott had decided to circle the field, make his landing on Runway No. 6 (south-north) into the gentle wind.

But somehow he had got too low. The left wing of the DC-3 brushed a high maple tree. There was a blinding blue flash as the ship ripped through a high-tension line, a deafening crash, silence. Then a woman began to cry.

By automobile it was only a minute or two from the field to the wreck. Trip 6, burst asunder like a watermelon, lay not 200 feet away from a schoolhouse in the little village of Bridgeton. The plane was broken in two, the two parts nearly at right angles. Amazingly, ten of her passengers were alive. Among them worked Stewardess Mary T. Eshbach, shaken up, cut. but still on her feet. The eleventh passenger, a T. W. A. employe, lay dead near by, crushed by a telephone pole. Not far off was the body of Captain Scott. Somehow, it appeared, he had made the one bad mistake that no airman can ever make twice.

Flight 6's crash was the fourth fatal airline accident (the fifth to wreck an airliner) since President Roosevelt reorganized the independent Civil Aeronautics Authority last summer, made it a dependency of the Department of Commerce and abolished the old Air Safety Board. At that time U. S. airlines had flown 15 months without a fatal crash. This week, as Pilot Scott was buried, fellow airmen recalled their warning, given to the President by the airlines and the Air Line Pilots' Association, and echoed by Senator Pat McCarran, author of the old CAA law: that to keelhaul a successful agency was to invite disaster.

Day of the St. Louis crash. Pat McCarran stood up in the Senate and announced the news. "I bring this matter to the attention of the Senate." said he, "in order that they may know that we were right in the first instance when we passed the act creating an independent agency. . . . When the Safety Board was abolished, when the CAA . . . was sent back into the Department of Commerce, chaos and confusion resulted. . . ."

Pending in the Senate is Pat McCarran's bill to put CAA back where it used to be. He will have plenty of ready & willing airline witnesses to call when his bill comes to a hearing.

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