Easter Excursion

A near-capacity load of 64 passengers, most of them Puerto Ricans, filed aboard the Pan American World Airways' DC-4, leaving Puerto Rico on a tourist-rate ($64) flight to New York for Easter. At 11:11 a.m., with a crew of five, the four-engine airliner took off from San Juan's Isla Grande Airport. Minutes later, the pilot reported engine trouble. At 11:22, the crippled plane, unable to reach the airport again, crashed into the sea. Battered by ten-foot waves, it broke up and sank in two minutes.

In those chaotic last moments, a Minnesota couple passed their two-year-old son through a window to a life raft, then were trapped in the sinking plane. Lieut. Commander John Natwing leaped from a Coast Guard amphibian that landed at the scene, seized one drowning passenger, and fought off sharks for half an hour until they were both pulled to safety. Another hero was the DC-4's captain. He helped some passengers out of the plane and managed to float four life rafts before the plane sank. He hauled a baby and an elderly woman to a raft, and went back to rescue a third floundering passenger.

The captain was John C. Burn, hero of an earlier Pan American crash. When his plane went down in the Tagus River near Lisbon in 1943, he rescued Singer Jane Froman from drowning despite his own broken back. The two were married in 1948, the bride still on crutches. When reporters brought the news of last week's crash to her Manhattan apartment, she cried: "It can't happen to us again." Then she learned that her husband was hospitalized in San Juan with minor injuries, and flew to Puerto Rico for a bedside reunion. He was one of only 17 survivors. The dead and missing totaled 52.

The Civil Aeronautics Board reported last week on the crash of a nonscheduled C46 airliner last December at Elizabeth, N. J. which took 56 lives--the first of three successive crashes within the city limits. The primary cause: engine cylinder-head nuts which had been screwed on too tightly, stripping the threads. Thus weakened, the head of No. 10 cylinder blew off in flight, drenching the engine with raw gasoline, which burst into flames. The plane then stalled and crashed. The report also charged the plane's owners, Miami Airlines Inc., with "inadequate" pilot training, overloading the plane with an unlisted passenger, and failure to investigate suspicious oil drippings on an engine cowling.

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