Peril from the Air

Ever since the day of the first transport airplane, U.S. citizens have been viewing their local airports with swelling civic pride. Even people who didn't care to ride in planes enjoyed watching them land and reflecting that their city had not been bypassed by the air age. Greater New York was no exception; it was as proud of those raucous, air-age beehives, La Guardia, Idlewild and Newark Airports, as of the sight of the Queen Mary sliding majestically up the Hudson.

But last week the big city suddenly began acting as though it wanted to turn its back on the air age. The reaction was triggered off when a National Airlines DC-6 crashed in Elizabeth, N.J., killing 28 passengers and four apartment dwellers (TIME, Feb. 18) and frightening hundreds of others almost out of their senses.

It was the third time in 2 1/2 months that a plane had plummeted on Elizabeth, and the Port of New York Authority, fearing riots, shut the $52 million Newark airport up tight within three hours.

Elizabeth civic leaders demanded that the airport be closed permanently. Real-estate values in the city dropped. Newark flights were switched to the other New York fields last week, increasing traffic pressure at La Guardia to a point where planes were landing and taking off every two minutes and similarly heightening activity at Idlewild. This moved nearby residents of Jackson Heights and Jamaica to a wave of protest that almost matched Elizabeth's. The subject became conversational topic A in a dozen other cities throughout the nation.

In a sense, all this had happened before: the automobile, the subway, the railroads had all been castigated as menaces to the community. As late as 1941, trains were not allowed to move along the New York Central freight tracks on Manhattan's West Side unless they were preceded by a horseman who carried a flag by day and a red lantern by night.

The airlines, wisely, did not adopt a public-be-damned attitude. To ease the pressure at La Guardia the airlines serving New York reduced daily flights from a peak of 725 to 454. Eastern Airlines' Eddie Rickenbacker, picked by the industry as its spokesman during the crisis, said: "I want the public to be satisfied."

If there were a few more plane crashes in built-up areas, the airlines would be faced with a strong public demand to put airports much farther from city centers. This would cut heavily into airline traffic by reducing their time advantage over ground transport on shorter runs.

The third Elizabeth crash was attributed to mechanical failure, the possibility of which can never be wholly eliminated. The Civil Aeronautics Administration reported last week that when one engine conked out, the propeller of another had reversed its pitch because of faulty wiring.

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