"Melon Against a Wall"

High over the desert, the bright blue exhausts of United Airlines' Flight 615 burned a flickering path through the predawn darkness. The big DC-6B, newest and fastest plane flying U.S. air lanes, was five hours out of Chicago, westbound for San Francisco. In command was Captain Marion W. ("Ted") Hedden, 42, an old hand at United, with twelve years of spotless service on his record.

At 5:16 a.m., just ten minutes behind schedule, Captain Hedden reported in to the tower at Oakland Airport, and began a standard instrument letdown through the overcast.

Ten minutes later, two unaccountable miles offcourse, the big blue and silver Mainliner smashed into the edge of a 1,500-ft. brush-covered mesa, cartwheeled over and went careening into a canyon. Early-morning factory workers in nearby Decoto, twenty miles southeast of Oakland, saw a blinding flash and "the big tail of a plane flopping over the crest," heard the explosions crashing through the canyons.

Half an hour later, the first rescuers and firemen toiled up the rutted road to the mesa's top. A Coast Guard plane had flown over and told them what to expect. It looked, said one of them, "as if you had thrown a ripe melon against a wall." The plane had splattered its smoking pieces over five acres. All 44 passengers and six crewmen were dead.

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