Tragic Coincidence?

Lonely Bahrein Island, off the east coast of Saudi Arabia in the Persian Gulf, is a hot, humid desert, inhabited mostly by Arabian pearl divers and British and American oil drillers. Its airport on nearby Muharrak Island is a stopover for Air France planes on the Saigon-Paris run, and French pilots don't particularly like it: the weather in the Gulf is treacherous, and within minutes fine flying weather can become a horror of sandstorms, torrential rains or typhoons.

One night last week, the weather around Bahrein was in one of its ugliest moods. A sandstorm scoured the airdrome and blotted visibility down to three-quarters of a mile as an Air France DC-4, carrying 43 passengers and a crew of eight on the regular Saigon-Paris run, called the field for landing instructions. At 1:15 a.m. the man in the tower signaled his O.K., waited for his first glimpse of the DC-4's landing lights. Forty minutes later, still waiting, he called for the rescue teams. Toward dawn, searchers in boats and aircraft found six survivors, eight bodies, and the plane itself. It had crashed in twelve feet of water, two miles off the island, obviously on its final approach to the runway.

Two nights later the sandstorm still raged, and a second DC-4 was lost Like the first plane, it was also on the final approach to the airstrip. It plunged into the sea within a mile of the first. The passengers who got out clung to the tail, and then, as the plane sank, to its broken aerial wire. Total loss in the two crashes: 85 lives.

Within hours of the first crash, a French government commission was on the way to Bahrein to investigate. It was headed by Maurice Bellonte, of the famed Coste-Bellonte team which flew nonstop from Paris to New York in 1930. There were rumors that in each crash the altimeter was faulty, but an early report from Airman Bellonte said that in the second plane at least, the instruments were "in good working order."

Were the two crashes at the same place merely a tragic coincidence? Paris newspapers did not think so, darkly hinted at sabotage. They pointed out that the first plane carried Henri Maux, French government official returning to Paris from strife-torn Indo-China with important documents which he had prepared for an interstate conference between Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos. Scheduled for June 26, the conference had to be postponed as a result of Maux's death. Also on the first plane: Raymond Rivet of the French Ministry of Finance. Rivet carried with him a full report on drug peddling, smuggling, and the dollar black market in Saigon.

While the investigation continued, Air France discontinued all night landings at Bahrein.

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