E Between Nine & Ten

Snow was sifting gently across the central Washington desert as the loaded C124 Globemaster waddled, with grumbling engines, to the end of the 10,000-foot runway at Larson Air Force Base. Visibility was a safe two miles, and lights from the mess halls of the base glittered cheerfully through the grey light of dawn. There was a tremendous crowd of servicemen in the plane's canvas seats--131, including the crew--but the powerful, double-decked Globemaster, built to carry 200 men with full packs, had room for all and to spare.

Most of them had been waiting around since 3 o'clock, had milled about the waiting room at the field punching candyvending machines, stocking up on 70-c- flight lunches. Their patience was undisturbed. The flight--number 0100 on the dispatcher's schedule--was bound for San Antonio as part of Operation Sleighride, a little airlift calculated to get returning Korean veterans and enlisted men from Northwest bases home in good time for Christmas. Some of them cheered when the plane began to roll at 6:30.

Less than two minutes later, most of them were dead or dying. The plane roared off the runway, labored, and settled. It crashed only 2 1/2miles from the end of the runway, and went screeching across the snowy desert floor at dizzying speed, disintegrating as it went. A wing fell off, then the other. The fuselage broke in two. Gasoline spilled, spread, flamed. The big forward section of the plane was enveloped in curtains of fire.

Back at the field. Sergeant Gerald Wright, the dispatcher, had watched the plan,e rise against the grey sky, waver and disappear. The glass windows in front of him vibrated, and the sky out over the desert suddenly glowed red. He stepped to a grid map before him, picked up an emergency phone, began calling: "Flight 0100 crashed at E between nine and ten . . . flight 0100 crashed at E between nine and ten ..." Thirty seconds later, fire engines went swerving out on to the runway, red lights flashing.

Rescue crews began tumbling out near the furnace-like fire only ten minutes later. Some of them wore heavy clothes, asbestos gloves, asbestos hoods with Plexiglas windows. They ran through the vast litter of wreckage toward the after section of fuselage. It had escaped the first of the fire, and many of the living had already got out of it, or had been pulled out by dazed fellow passengers. The rescuers went into the flames with fire foam, pulled out more men, lifted the whole massive tail assembly with a crane to get a man pinned beneath it.

The base hospital began a desperate battle to save burned and broken survivors; some got as much as twelve pints of blood. Civilian doctors hurried in from miles around, and Air Force wives were pressed into service as nurses as the fight went on. Meanwhile, the luckiest of the survivors, some of whom had hardly a scratch, tried to reconstruct the accident. Most simply knew that the plane had lurched frighteningly and dropped after takeoff. Why? The bandaged flight engineer, rousing from a coma, cried only: "Myra, I checked the power!" and lapsed back into unconsciousness.

At week's end, 86 men were dead, the worst death toll in the history of aviation.

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