Disintegration & Disaster

The 105 passengers with tickets on National Airlines 707 jet flight to Miami waited impatiently at New York's Idlewild Airport one night last week. Scheduled departure was 9:15 p.m., but the ground crew reported a cracked windshield on the Boeing 707, and National had to substitute two other planes--a turboprop Lockheed Electra and a conventional Douglas DC-6B. First come, first served, 76 passengers went aboard the Electra, and the plane roared off for Miami at 11:25, arrived safely about 3 1/2 hours later. At 11:51 p.m. the remaining 29 passengers and a crew of five took off in the DC-6B. Less than three hours later they were dead.

As airline and Civil Aeronautics Board investigators pieced things together, the DC-6B had just started a 550-mile over-water leg between Wilmington, N.C. and Miami at the assigned altitude of 18,000 ft. when the plane began to disintegrate.

One body and chunks of fuselage washed in from the ocean; other bodies were scattered over 16 miles to the point where the forward section crashed in a plowed field near the hamlet of Bolivia, N.C., 15 miles inland. Pilot Dale Southard, 46, a World War II Military Air Transport Service veteran, evidently had some warning of trouble, for some passengers were wearing life jackets. But he made no emergency radio calls. All signs indicated that he was heading back toward Wilmington, fighting desperately to hold his plane on course as it lost altitude and tore itself apart. Some experts guessed that the trouble could have been caused by a runaway propeller; others wondered about a mid-air explosion.

But not until all the pieces were reassembled, and all the fragments of bodies examined, were inspectors likely to make a knowledgeable guess about one of the strangest crashes in U.S. aviation history.

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