"Oh, How I Prayed"

Twice in eight weeks, Elizabeth, N.J. heard the thunder of an exploding airplane, and rushed to the streets to pick up the dead. The planes, one taking off, the other landing at nearby Newark Airport, crashed in the heart of the city, killing 79 passengers and six of Elizabeth's citizens. City officials blamed the airport for routing the planes over their homes, demanded that the field be shut down. The Port of New York Authority announced that it was rushing work on a new runway that would shunt most of the traffic away from Elizabeth.

The new runway was not yet in operation last Sunday night, when National Airlines' Flight 101 rolled out for takeoff. With 59 Miami-bound passengers, the four-engined DC-6 climbed south over the moonlit marshes.

At 1,000 ft., Stewardess Nancy Taylor, checking her passenger lists in the rear of the plane, heard an engine cough, begin to sputter, then die: "It made a terrible rumbling sound." The plane nosed downward. The radio at Newark Tower crackled out a message: "Is everything all right?" The pilot replied: "I lost an engine. Am coming back."

Stewardess Taylor heard the pilot gunning the good engines: "We seemed to level off. Then, about a minute later, we started falling and I knew we were going to crash. I could hear screams and yells. Oh, how I prayed."

The plane swung low over Elizabeth, fighting for altitude. In a top-floor apartment at 656 Salem Avenue, Mrs. Wally Shulan heard the plane. "I think it's going to hit," she cried to her husband. Skimming low, the airliner lost flying speed, smashed into the roof of the apartment house, skidded across, spilling gas from its broken tanks, and dropped into a children's playground. Within seconds the 50-family apartment house was in flames.

Stunned and blackened figures began staggering away from the DC-6's shattered fuselage, wandered into the street littered with bodies and bits of twisted metal. Stewardess Taylor was found hanging upside down, still strapped in her seat. "I'm so mixed up," she mumbled. "It's so terrible."

The stewardess was the only survivor of the crew of four. Amazingly, 36 of the 59 passengers got out alive. Four residents of the apartment house were killed. The Port of New York Authority closed down Newark Airport, one of the nation's busiest and best, to consider what fate and mechanical failures had done.

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