Thunderbolt

It was raining heavily as the C46 Curtiss Commando snored down through the morning overcast over Long Island and headed for New York's big Idlewild International Airport. The plane, a cargo transport, had left Fort Lauderdale, Fla. seven hours before with 13,700 Ibs. of cut flowers, fresh vegetables and lingerie. It had made a routine flight, with fuel stops at Charleston, S.C. and Raleigh, N.C., and despite the murk it seemed about to make an equally routine landing--the ceiling hung at 500 feet and visibility was a mile and a half.

Blazing Floods. At 400 feet, however, just as the C46 was about to make a left-hand turn toward the southeast and Idlewild's Runway 13, it ran into a patch of drifting cloud which obscured visibility. Its captain, 27-year-old William B. Crockett Jr. of Fort Lauderdale (who was alone in the plane with his 29-year-old copilot and fellow townsman Jack L. Woerderhoff), was directed to pull up, and begin another approach.

Less than three minutes later, the plane came roaring through the rain just over the rooftops of heavily populated Jamaica, on the outskirts of New York City, 4 1/4 miles north of Idlewild. The plane was settling rapidly. Then with a doomlike crash, it plowed through a house, smashed into a parking lot and disintegrated. Terrified men, women & children all through the block were thrown out of bed,knocked off their feet, buried or bruised by smashed plaster and fallen timbers. At the same split second, flame from blazing floods of aviation gasoline burst into great curtains of fire. Clouds of smoke, and of steam created by the driving rain, billowed skyward. Trees filled magically with nightgowns and lingerie from the cargo.

Fright & Anger. When the flames were finally out, five were dead--the pilot, copilot, two men smashed in the crumpled houses and a police inspector whose automobile was crushed, half a block away, by a flying piece of wreckage. Ten people had to be hospitalized. Dozens of others nursed minor burns and wounds. Five houses were wrecked. Two dozen automobiles were damaged.

New York reacted with fright and anger. Ever since Newark Airport was closed last Feb. 11, as the result of three crashes which killed a total of 119 people, Idlewild and La Guardia Airports had been forced to handle all air traffic for greater New York. At week's end, some New Yorkers began demanding that Idlewild and La Guardia be shut down too.

Over Mobile, Ala. last week, two Air Force transports -- a four-engine C124 Globemaster and a two-engine C-47--collided in midair, and fell with a window-rattling roar. All 15 people aboard the two ships--among them three returning Korean Army veterans and a mother & child --died when the planes crashed on the outskirts of town.

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