Death Comes at Ermenonville

In flat bureaucratic prose, the U.S. Federal Aviation Agency issued an order last week directing flight crews on all McDonnell-Douglas DC-10 jumbo jets to make certain that the cargo holds of their planes are locked and properly sealed before they take off. Behind those words may well be the solution to the mystery of the worst air disaster in history: the crash near Paris on March 3 of a Turkish Airlines DC-10, in which at least 344 passengers and crew members lost their lives.

The wide-bodied jetliner had arrived lightly loaded at Paris' Orly Airport from Istanbul, en route to London. When it departed, Flight 905 was nearly full, largely because of a British Airways strike, which caused 216 additional passengers to be put on the ill-fated craft. When the plane took off for the 60-minute flight to Britain's Heathrow Airport, the manifest listed some 200 Britons, 48 Japanese, 42 Turks, a sprinkling of other nationalities and 22 Americans, including Wayne Wilcox, cultural attache of the U.S. embassy in London, his wife and the two eldest of their four children.

Voice communications with the ground were routine throughout the brief eleven-minute flight. The first and only hint of trouble came when a radar operator at Orly saw streaks around the DC-10's blip at 13,000 ft. Moments later the aircraft disappeared from the screen; from the location of the crash, it appears that the pilot, Captain Nejat Berkoz, 44, was attempting to land at Charles de Gaulle airport at Roissy, Europe's newest and largest, which goes into operation this week. He missed by several miles, crashing in the peaceful forest of Ermenonville, a game refuge in the gentle hills northeast of Paris.

Sabotage was immediately suspected. The same day, Arab terrorists had hijacked a British Airways VC-10, forced it to land at Amsterdam, and set it afire after releasing 102 passengers. Turkish airline officials, mindful of the fact that a number of antigovernment terrorists had been arrested near Paris last December, were convinced that "an explosion" had occurred. Investigators from the U.S., France and Britain, however, were struck by similarities to an American Airlines DC-10 mishap in June 1972. That plane, en route from Buffalo to Detroit, suffered major damage when a cargo hatch blew off at 11,750 ft. The resulting rapid decompression buckled the cabin floor, thus disrupting control cables. The crew was able to land the plane at Detroit with only a few minor injuries.

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