Ceiling 300

When a white light flamed to full intensity on the instrument board of Eastern Air Lines Trip 21--New York to Brownsville--slim, 30-year-old Pilot Jim Perry knew that below him in the night was Stone Mountain. Not far from the radio fan marker that set the bulb alight, the unfinished stone faces of Gutzon Borglum's Confederate Memorial were sweaty with fog and rain. Atlanta's Candler Field was only twelve miles away. It was 11:37 p.m.

Jim Perry reported his position by radio, got the Atlanta weather from the tower. It was no bargain. The cloud base was only 300 feet off the ground and even this ceiling was variable. Standing on the ground, a man could see only one mile; beyond that range, drizzling rain and thin fog blotted out lights. Had the weather been a jot worse--it was down to CAA minimum--Jim Perry would have had to land somewhere else.

Trip 21 crossed over the radio range 800 feet above the field level at 11:44, swung left on the southeast leg for the approved instrument approach procedure. Somewhere beyond he made a procedure turn off the beam, held it briefly, swung back and headed for the field.

In Trip 21's cabin, most of the 13 passengers were in their berths. But Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, the line's husky president, the U. S.'s No. 1 fighting pilot of World War I, was up. He was getting off at Atlanta. Little Clarence Moore, the trim British steward, was dressed, too.

Trip 21 gave a lurch. Behind her in the rain swirled the twigs of a tall poplar. The cabin lights went out. She hurtled through spiked pines, bursting her guts horribly, flumped to the ground. There she roared at death and lay still. Then from her twisted frame, from the red Georgia earth where they had been thrown, her survivors began to shout, first to each other, then for help.

Four of her passengers were dead. So were the three men of her crew. Clarence Moore's body was wedged under Eddie Rickenbacker in the wreckage. Rickenbacker shouted to his fellow passengers not to light cigarets. The gasoline tanks had burst, and he could not move. His hip, nose and ribs were broken.

As Trip 21 lay dead in the dark, men were out looking for her. But until the sun came up, no one found her. Clad in pajamas or underwear, drenched in the cold rain, the survivors huddled on the ground or lay in the wreckage waiting for help. One man went to find it, fell in a ravine, stood in water until morning. When men with stretchers came on them at dawn, the nine who were alive grinned with blue lips. The seven dead, including Maryland's Congressman William Devereux Byron, had to wait.

After 17 months of safe operation, U. S. airlines had had their sixth crash--the fifth fatal accident in six months. (It was Eastern's second in eleven years of crack operation.) In that time death on airliners had taken 54 men & women. To Atlanta hurried CAB's crash experts to try to figure out what had happened. To start with, at least, they had a baffler. Trip 21 had gone down while on the beam, headed just where she should have headed. Experienced Pilot Perry apparently had started the same maneuver that brought in two other airliners safely that night under the same conditions. But somehow he had run out of altitude. Whether it was because of mechanical trouble or by his own misjudgment, no one could say until the wreckage had been examined, analyzed. Nor could anyone, with justice, blame the crash on CAB until the remains had been studied.

Nevertheless, Nevada's Pat McCarran, author of the old CAA act, trumpeted on the floor of the Senate: "This legalized murder should stop." He sat tousle-headed and glaring while bumbling Alben Barkley tried to defend Franklin Roosevelt's reorganization of CAA which abolished the crack, independent Air Safety Board. A Senate subcommittee will investigate the Atlanta crash. And when Pat McCarran's bill to set aside Franklin Roosevelt's reorganization comes to hearing, there will be plenty of fireworks.

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