Ten Years Later

As Jane Froman settled in the witness stand last week, her withered right leg was plainly visible to the jury and the tense, packed Manhattan courtroom. Songstress Froman was asking $2,500,000 for damages suffered in the tragic Pan American Yankee Clipper crash in Lisbon's Tagus River ten years ago, in which 24 were killed. She wept softly as she recalled the crash. "I saw flashes of lightning as the plane approached the airport . . . I remember the plane banking to the left . . . I came to in the water. I was under the water. I pushed myself to the top. I called out for help. They came and took me to the dock. When I arrived at the hospital I couldn't move my arms, and the bones were sticking out of my leg."

Jane Froman's subsequent struggles were amply retold in last year's Hollywood extravaganza, With a Song in My Heart. Her right leg was nearly severed, and for weeks she was near death. Then began a slow, painful recovery which included 25 operations, years in wheelchairs and on crutches. Finally she walked onstage again, but she still needs a heavy, ugly brace (she is now a $4,000-a-week TV star). In 1948 Jane divorced her husband, Singer Donald Ross, a month later married Pilot John C. Burn, a fellow survivor of the Lisbon crash who had helped pull her out of the Tagus despite his own broken back.*

In Jane Froman's supporting cast last week were Accordionist Gypsy Markoff, another Clipper victim, who asked $1,000,000 for her own injuries and loss of income, and Jane's ex-husband Ross, who sued for $100,000, to cover her hospital bills and his own loss of her company. The three had lost an early round, in 1949, when Pan Am's lawyers invoked the Warsaw Convention, a 1929 international agreement which sets a ceiling of $8,291.67 damages in an international flight accident. Now the suits charge that Pan American Pilot R. O. D. Sullivan recklessly disregarded instructions from the Lisbon Airport. The Warsaw limitation does not apply when the crash is caused by "willful misconduct." If the plaintiffs can prove willful misconduct, they may be able to collect a lot more than $8,291.67.

This week Pilot Sullivan testified that he didn't know what happened, that the plane failed to respond to the controls.

In Washington last week, a federal court jury decided that Eastern Air Lines must pay $65,000 for the deaths of Mr. & Mrs. Ralph Miller, who were among the 55 (including Cartoonist Helen Hokinson) killed in a 1949 crash over National Airport. Claims against Eastern growing out of this accident may total $15 million; the Miller case is the first of these to be decided. The Bolivian government refused to accept legal responsibility for Bolivian Pilot Erick Rios Bridoux, whose plane rammed the airliner.

*In April 1952, Captain Burn was piloting another Pan Am plane, en route to New York from Puerto Rico, when it crashed into the sea, killing 52. He was charged with "questionable flying technique" by the Civil Aeronautics Board, left Pan Am two week's ago.

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