Eastern Airlines Flight 45's Mid AIr Collision And Epic Dead-Stick Landing.

Eastern Airlines Flight 45 Midair Collision. DC-3/A-26

July 1945

Distracted Pilots, And Serious Stick And Rudder Skills.

Many people have trouble getting their minds around the sheer number of military aircraft in the air over the U.S on any given day during World War II. It's probably impossible to come up with even an accurate average number of flights on any given day, but between training, testing new aircraft and technology, ferrying aircraft, and inter-installation transport of supplies, equipment, and personnel there were thousands of flights every day from December 1941 through the end of 1945.

With that many flights on a daily basis, accidents were all but inevitable, and with that era's absolute lack of any regional air traffic control once aircraft were beyond visual range of an airfield, it was equally inevitable that some of those accidents would be mid-air collisions. Modern aviation was still under development, and the war was forcing the volume of traffic to completely outpace the development of the technology and procedures needed to handle it.

The majority of the mid-airs over the Continental U.S. during the war involved a pair of military aircraft, but not all of them. World War II was book-ended by a pair of midair collisions involving airliners...DC-3s in both cases...and the second aircraft involved in both accidents was an Army Air Force bomber. Thing is, the causes of the two collisions were just about 180 degrees apart. While the first collision...The Infamous Palm Springs Midair...was a blatant case of reckless flying, the second midair, involving an Eastern Airlines DC-3 and an Army Air Force A-26 Invader, was simply a case of both aircraft being in the wrong place at the wrong time as well as an early example of a problem that persists..in the air and, especially, on the ground...to this very day. And that still-persistent problem would be accidents caused by someone operating a vehicle...be it airborne or ground-bound...while distracted by other tasks.

When all the investigations into this one were complete, it was determined that neither pilot was flying recklessly, but both of them were, officially at any rate, at fault. And the reason that were both found to be at fault is because both pilots became so preoccupied with tasks inside the cockpit that they both failed...for a critical minute or so...to pay attention to what was going on outside the cockpit.

That being said, this particular accident still ended on a far more positive note than the great majority of mid-air collisions, and we can thank Eastern Airlines Captain Gaston D. Davis for that. While he may have been found to be partially at fault for the mid-air, he performed a bit of serious dead-stick flying after the collision that saved most of his passengers and was a precursor to the amazing dead-stick water landing, very aptly named 'The Miracle On The Hudson', made by a guy named Sully sixty-six years later. Thanks to a couple of little details and differences, though, Captain Davis' feat of dead-stick flying just might out-ass-kick Sully's landing by a point or two.

Don't get me wrong...while Chelsea Sullenberger's Hudson River landing was a truly amazing bit of flying, and while his bird had indeed lost both engines, forcing him to dead-stick it in to that now legendary water landing, his aircraft was structurally sound and gave him a little...not much, but a little...time to pick and choose a landing spot.  Davis, on the other hand, was flying an aircraft that was going down right then after suffering severe structural damage while also loosing both engines (One of them very literally), and, legendary as it is, was saddled with some of the worst stall characteristics of any airplane ever built. Davis, IMHO, wins that one on points.

For this one we head back in time to the tag end of Wold War II, July of 1945, in the skies over South Carolina. The War in Europe had ended in May (And troops not needed for the occupation of the defeated Axis nations were being transferred to the Pacific Theater en masse.). The Japanese forces were on the ropes, but they didn't want to admit it yet, and we were gearing up for an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands that, had it taken place, would have made Normandy look like a cake-walk ...An option that, thankfully, we never had to use. 

While the War in the Pacific was still very much in progress in July of 1945, the end of the War in Europe had allowed life along The East Coast to start a long, slow slide towards normal, though it would take it a while to get there. With the war still being fought in the Pacific gas rationing and restrictions on driving, along with other types of rationing, were still in place and.

Even though driving restrictions and gas rationing were still very much in place, restrictions on air travel had eased to the point that people were being allowed to fly for pleasure again. The number of travelers who were flying for pleasure rather than business was still a tiny fraction of what it had been in, say, 1940, but people were indeed booking vacations and weekend get-aways again. They couldn't drive anywhere, but they could fly there and grab a cab...Taxi companies, I believe, got unrestricted gasoline allotments.

So, when Eastern Airlines Flight 45 lifted off of the active runway at Logan Airport at about 8;55 am  on that warm, clear Thursday morning, enroute to Miami, it's a pretty good bet that at least some of the passengers were heading out of Bean Town simply because they wanted to get out of Boston for a few days.

Note, however, that I didn't say heading for Miami for a few days...Nonstop flights from Point A to Point B weren't a thing yet. Any given flight from one major city to another was going to have a few intermediate stops in between, both for fuel and possibly a crew change, and as a convenience for the flying public who needed to get from, say, Boston to New York or Washington...which happened to be Flight 45's first two intermediate stops...faster than by train. (The wartime National speed limit of 35 miles per hour would have made either trip a long drive even if gas and tire rationing and driving restrictions hadn't made intercity driving impossible for most people in the first place).

A restored Eastern Airlines DC-3 making a low pass at an airshow. This is the paint scheme that Eastern used during that era, with most of the aircraft left in natural aluminum. Eastern even capitalized on this scheme by declaring it's fleet of DC-3's 'The Great Silver Fleet', and proudly painting that slogan on it's planes, above the cabin windows.

Also note that when the DC-3's landing gear was retracted, the main wheels protruded from the wheel wells...a common feature with early retractable gear aircraft. This actually reduced damage some in a gear-up landing on a runway...not sure it helped much if the plane bellied in in a cotton field, especially considering the fact that the A-26's vertical stabilizer tore into the left engine nacelle just about even with the left main wheel.

Note how low the engines are mounted in relation to the fuselage, and how long the prop blades are, and you can see how the mechanics of the actual collision and damage worked. The top of the A-26's fuselage came real close to kissing the underside of the DC-3 when it was kicked up into airliner's the right prop.  When the DC-3's left engine was torn loose, it's prop probably tore into the fuselage just about dead center of the Eastern Airlines Logo...according to the C.A.B. report, just aft of the baggage compartment door. Only sheer luck kept it from taking out the control cables while it was at it...the fact that they remained intact allowed Captain Davis to belly it in in a cotton field, saving all but one of his passengers.

Flight 45 made a crew change in New York, with veteran Eastern Airlines Captain Gaston D. Davis taking over command and chief pilot duties, and Norman L Martindale taking over as 2nd Officer. They probably added fuel either there or in D.C, and when they took off from Washington's National Airport at 12:22 PM, they still had two stops to make before reaching Miami...Columbia, South Carolina, about two hours away, and Jacksonville, Florida, which they'd never reach, not on that day or on that particular DC-3 at any rate. The New York-Miami leg of the trip was probably Davis and Martindale's regular route, making the flight routine to the point of near boredom for them until they approached the small city of Florence, South Carolina.

As long as they didn't hit any of the infamous Summer turbulence that was caused by thermals rising above the sun-heated farm fields the flight was probably a pleasant one for Flight 45's passengers. Other than a few puffy cumulus clouds drifting around at or just above their cruising altitude of 5000 feet with the wispy mares-tails of cirrus clouds riding way above them, the weather was clear, with visibility of six to ten miles. Those passengers not reading, dozing, or talking with their fellow passengers were probably watching the rural South's summer-patchwork pass by beneath them.  Mrs A.E.Williams was entertaining her two year old son, as the mother of another baby on board the flight was doing with he own child. A couple of passengers who were bound for Columbia probably checked their watches as Flight 45 approached Florence, knowing they were only about fifteen or twenty minutes out from their destination.

Little did they know they were about to share a experience that would stay with them for all of their lives. And little did Davis know that he was unknowingly getting ready to set them up for it by taking what he thought was a precaution that would make this part of the trip safer.

Before we go into just exactly what that precaution was we have to remember something...Aviation in the 1940s was a far, far different animal than it is today. Radar wasn't available to civilian authorities yet, and wouldn't be for close to a decade, so there was no regional air traffic control as there is today because without Radar there was absolutely no way for an air traffic controller to monitor traffic that he couldn't actually see from the control tower cab. This, of course, also meant that there was absolutely no way to alert a pilot hundreds of miles away of possible conflicting traffic, or to even be aware of that conflicting traffic in the first place.

The airway system, however, was already in place, though it, too, was a different beast from the system in place today. There were no high altitude jet airways, because there was no need for them...the 'J' prefixed Jet airways hadn't even been contemplated yet, because there were no high-flying pressurized airliners to take advantage of them.

Back then all of the airways were low altitude airways because the unpressurized airliners of the day (Mostly DC-3s) cruised at altitudes ranging form 5,000 to 10,000 feet. The airways were designated using a color and a number, and the airway that Flight 45 was following as it approached Florence, S.C. that afternoon was designated Amber 6.

*

If you take a look at a satellite view of  today's Florence Municipal Airport, look closely at the northern portion of the airport and you can see the remains of what was Florence Army Airfield. Back in July 1945 the field was the home of the 334th Army Air Forces Base Unit (Replacement Training Unit, Light Bombardment), and on July 12th at around 1:15 PM, an Army Air Force A-26 Invader attached to that unit and wearing BuNo 44-35553 left Florence Army Air Field under the command of 1st Lieutenant Steven Jones.  The A-26 was en route to a training area about 40 miles Northwest of Florence for an exercise that was supposed to take them about two hours to finish. It would be an eventful two hours.

Florence Regional Airport today...you can still see the old Army Airfield's runway pattern, also Florence Regional's original runway pattern, at the north end of the property (Circled in red) . Note the yellow 'X's denoting them as closed runways. The airport's terminal and executive/general aviation terminal are still at that end of the airport, and use one of the old runways as a taxiway. 

Of course, seventy-two years ago, those two runways and the area immediately surrounding were packed with olive-drab painted aircraft and teemed with activity. Our A-26 departed from one of those runways, of course, it and two of it's crew of three, sadly, never to return.

The A-26 was a twin engine light bomber/ground attack aircraft, also built by Douglas...it was 48 feet long with a 61 foot wing span and a bomb load of 2000 pounds. It was also armed with a trio of 50 caliber machine guns...a twin turret on the upper fuselage, and a single tail gun...and carried a crew of from 3-5 depending on the mission profile.

It had a top speed of just shy of 360 MPH, but just giving the dry facts about the plane sells it short, because the A-20 was probably one of the most adaptable and sweetest flying planes to take to the air during World War II. Pilots loved it because they could throw it around the sky like a fighter, and crews loved it because it was tough, dependable, and had a reputation for bringing them home even with severe damage.

BTW...see that high, high vertical stabilizer? It's going to be a factor...

*

Because Flight 45's New York-Miami leg was Davis' regular gig, he was well aware that the Amber 6 Airway put him just West of Florence and, more importantly, within a couple of miles of the Army Air Field and it's often heavy traffic. And this could be a problem. Florence was both a position reporting point, and the point where they began their descent into Columbia, 62 miles and, at their cruise speed of 210 MPH, just over fifteen minutes south. When he started his descent into Columbia, he'd have enough to contend with without having to keep his neck on a swivel in order to stay out of the way of any errant Army Air Force pilots and aircraft.

This is why they were actually about ten miles west of Florence, and eight or so miles west of the airway when Flight 45 reported over Florence at about 2:30 PM. Remember that precaution I told you that Davis took...this was it. While still a good bit north of Florence, and the Army Air Field, Davis eased into a right turn, flew diagonally away from the airway for about two minutes and change, then resumed his southerly course. Basically he was creating his own airborne bypass, something he'd probably been doing for the entirety of the war, to avoid the heavy military traffic going in and out of F.A.A.F.

So, as Martindale reported to Eastern's Columbia Office that they were 'Over Florence and beginning their descent' and Davis eased them into a very gentle 200 or so foot per minute descent and pulled the pre-landing checklist card out, they were actually eight or ten miles west of Florence, and well out of the way of the Army...so they thought.

*

When the A-26 took off from Florence Army Airfield and headed for the practice area 40 miles northwest of Florence, they were planning on spending two hours at what the news reports termed 'Combat Training'. Whether they were practicing bomb-runs or ground attack gunnery (AKA strafing), their evolution only took 30 minutes or so, and they were on the way back home by a shade before two PM. Problem...they were supposed to spend two hours training, so they had to use up another hour and a quarter or so doing something of a training-like nature.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that, even though it wasn't mentioned anywhere, this particular aircraft may have had some radio work done shortly before that training flight. Specifically, repair to the Radio Direction Finder. Why do I say this? Because Lt. Jones, who was in charge of the aircraft and crew, decided to practice Aural Null Procedures, which entailed using the Radio Direction Finder, hereafter referred to as the RDF.  I can just about hear them discussing what to do with the remainder of their block of training time, with one of them remembering the radio work, then saying 'Wonder if they actually fixed the thing...?' So they decided to find out, and log it as training.

Of course I don't know for sure that's what happened, but what ever the reason, Jones' decision to practice Aural Null Procedures...a fancy term for using the signal from a radio station at a known location to determine your bearing from that location...at that particular time and place played a huge part in what was about to happen.

A RDF has a rotatable loop antenna, and to get a bearing using an aural null signal you rotate the antenna until the incoming signal is at it's weakest, then read the bearing, and that's your aircraft's bearing relative to the station where the signal is originating.

You can also, of course, turn the entire aircraft, as in make a wide, sweeping turn or three, which is the method Lt. Jones decided to use.

So he tuned the RDF's receiver to a Florence station and began a series of wide turns while checking the signal strength and null signal against the bearing to the station. Which kept his eyes in the cockpit for much of the time. But Jones wasn't worried, because he was likely aware of other Army flights in the area, and any commercial traffic should be at least eight to ten miles east of them as well as a couple of thousand feet above them. Commercial traffic was usually flying at 5000 feet or higher as it overflew Florence...they were at 3200 feet,

He must have glanced at the 8-day-clock on the plane's panel as he banked into a wide, wide left hand turn, because he would later be able to tell both Army and C.A.B. investigators that he entered the turn at just about 4:36 PM.  Jones held the bank angle at about 20 degrees while keeping his airspeed right at 220 MPH...just shy of 4 miles per minute...as he watched the meter on the RDF receiver while listening to the radio station, waiting for both the meter and his ears to tell him when they reached the signal's lowest strength. He held the turn for a good ninety seconds, until he got the null signal, then rolled out of the turn just as sun glinted off of polished aluminum to his right...

*

Meanwhile, Flight 45 had dropped from it's cruise altitude of 5000 feet to about 3200 feet as Davis and Martindale went through the challenge and reply of the pre-landing checklist. In the cabin, passengers talked or read or maybe even snoozed. At that particular moment, though, no one was looking out of the left cabin windows. They were a bit south and west of the town of Darlington, itself about ten or so miles northwest of Florence, and a couple of miles east and a little north of a wide spot in the road named Syracuse when a flicker of movement...maybe sun glinting off of plexiglass...caught Davis' eye and he looked up from his checklist and out of the left corner of the DC-3's windscreen...

 'Where the hell did HE come from!?!' 

Davis' stomach curled itself into a knot when he spotted the impossible specter of an A-26 about a football field away, at exactly his altitude, and 'blossoming'...getting bigger and closer almost too fast to comprehend, coming at him at an angle that just about guaranteed it would slam into their left side in a classic, devastating  broadside collision.

The instant he saw the A-26 to his left, (Even as he very likely cursed out loud) he pulled back hard on the yoke, probably fire-walling the throttles at the same instant to keep the sudden climb from slowing them below their stall speed, as he tried desperately to climb above the bomber's flight path. As rugged and reliable as DC-3's are, they aren't fighters and the instant or so it took the elevators to bite air and kick the nose up probably felt more like a decade. Still, they were climbing hard as the A-26 disappeared behind the cockpit, already the apparent size of an airborne battleship, and getting bigger by the instant.

Davis was about to prove himself to be a pilot's pilot.

*

With 1400 hours in the air...300 of them in the A-26...Jones wasn't exactly a rookie himself. He rolled out of his turn and spotted the Eastern DC-3 about a football field or so to his right at the exact same altitude and knew that he was about two seconds away from hitting it broadside. He shoved the A-26's yoke forward even as the airliner grew to fill his windscreen in less than an instant. The DC-3 rose above them and flashed overhead as the A-26 shot beneath it...but Jones never had time to even start breathing a sigh of relief.

One of the A-26's distinctive features was a high, squared off vertical stabilizer, and several things happened to it in less than an eye-blink, none of them vaguely good. First, the bomber was slewed to the right as the DC-3's left wing slammed into the upper half of the vertical stabilizer, which then slid along the wing's leading edge and ripped into the left engine nacelle, tearing the engine loose and body-slamming it against the airliner's fuselage while tearing away the top five feet or so of the stabilizer.  If that had been the only damage the A-26 suffered, it may have stayed in the air at least long enough for everyone to bail out...but that damage was already on the way to becoming a mute point...

When the stabilizer slammed into the DC-3's left engine nacelle it slewed the airliner around to the right and kicked the bomber's nose upward slightly, tilting it's rear fuselage up into the airliner's right propeller, which tore into the bomber's fuselage just about even with the upper twin-fifty caliber gun turret, killing the gunner instantly as it destroyed the turret and ripped through the fuselage structure like a buzz saw on crack.  The top five or six feet feet of the vertical stabilizer were gone, but that, again, was a mute point because the fuselage snapped apart like a stick, the tail fluttering and twisting as it went down while the front half of the bomber flipped over on it's back and went straight in..

Even strapped into his seat, Jones was knocked around the ship's narrow cockpit like a bean in a rattle as the two planes slammed together with a cataclysmic 'CRUMP!!! that was instantly overshadowed by a shrill metallic screeching as the DC-3's right prop tore into the A-26's fuselage. The bomber's engines were still roaring as it's tail tore away, and Jones hadn't even finished bouncing off the sides of the cockpit before the plane flipped over violently, giving him a glimpse of the shattered tail flipping and twisting as it fell. 

The A-26's tail gunner had been killed in the collision, but a nose gunner/bombardier was in the plane's nose, ahead of and below (Now above) the cockpit. With the ground coming up fast, Jones yelled for the nose gunner to bail out even as he hit both the canopy jettison and the quick-release for his own harness. With the plane inverted, he probably didn't even have to push off...he just fell out of the cockpit, maybe kicking  off of the cockpit coming to try and kick himself clear of the plane. Jones was at about 900 feet when he bailed out, so when he yanked his ripcord and his 'chute opened he was already almost kicking tree-tops...he probably barely even swung once before hitting the soft soil of a South Carolina cotton field. The bomber didn't beat him down by much, augering in in a ball of fire only an instant or two before his boots hit the field.

*

Bedlam erupted aboard the DC-3 at the same instant that the bomber disappeared behind and below the cockpit...Davis was thrown forward against his seat belt as the wing slammed into the A-26's vertical stabilizer, then shoulder-slammed into the cockpit's left sidewall as the vertical stabilizer cracked into the airliner's left engine. The side window smacked a starry fireworks display behind his eyes even as the engine ripped free from the left nacelle, and, trailing fuel lines, wires and the odd structural support or two, caromed into and ricocheted off of the fuselage with another heavy thud that made the cockpit shiver. Though the engine shut down the instant it ripped free, the prop was still windmilling and tore into the fuselage just aft of the baggage compartment and just below the floor of the passenger cabin, miraculously missing both passengers and control cables.

In the passenger cabin, none of the passengers saw the bomber until maybe the instant it hit them, but they felt it and heard it...The loud, apocalyptic metallic 'CRUMP!!' of impact as they were jerked sideways, the passengers in the left window seats smacking the side of the plane just as Davis had, even as the engine smacked the side of the airliner with a second solid and heavy 'Thunk!!' that probably shook the passenger cabin like the blow from a giant mallet. I'm thinking that Mrs. Williams was in one of those left hand seats with her son sitting in her lap...he was catapulted into the sidewall head first, his mom, while trying to hold him, did a header into the sidewall as well. 

The violence of the collision itself lasted maybe a quarter of a second and then it was over...they were still in the air and the plane seemed to be under control, though the nose was angling downward. One engine was running, but it seemed to be racing, running far faster than normal and the plane was shuddering as if in a seizure. Then Mrs. Williams picked her son up...and started screaming....

*

"The hell did we hit???" Davis heard Martindale ask him as he popped back out of the head-crack induced semi-consciousness that couldn't have lasted more than a second or two.

"A bomber hit us This thing coming apart on us??" Davis asked, as if he was asking 'Is it still raining outside? The plane was shuddering and the right engine was racing...there was NO noise from the left engine because...unbeknown to them right then...there was no left engine any more.

The first thing Davis likely did was yank both throttles back to Idle-Cutoff, and the shuddering stopped as the right engine quit beating the air with the mangled and useless right propeller. The shuddering and racing engine was replaced by a silence that can only be that deafening in an airplane with the engines out. It wasn't absolute silence though...wind was rushing past the cockpit and whistling through the rip in the fuselage where their own left prop had eaten into the plane's skin. And there was a woman in the passenger cabin screaming about her baby.

The impact had slewed them around, and, without power and with unknown structural damage, Davis didn't want to do a whole lot of maneuvering...where ever the nose was aimed was where they were putting this crate down. Thankfully, Florence County, South Carolina was Cotton Country, so they were pretty well surrounded by cotton fields. 

Of course they had to keep the airliner from stalling...loosing airspeed to the point the wings no longer provided lift...at all costs. DC-3s had (And have) a nasty tendency to drop their nose and snap over into a spin when they stall, and that would absolutely be the end of the ball game.  Davis pushed forward on the yoke putting the DC-3 into a fairly steep dive ('We still have elevators!) to keep airspeed up. It wasn't so much 'Picking a field' as 'Where ever this thing's nose is aimed is where we're going to land'

Martindale grabbed the radio mike and told their Columbia, S.C. dispatcher that they had been involved in a mid-air and that they were going down 'Somewhere south of Darlington' as Davis gazed through the windshield, trying to figure out exactly where they were going to end up given their present glide path. Wind was roaring past the DC-3's 'V' windshield and screeching through the tear in the fuselage as he spun the elevator trim wheel, trying to find the best trim configuration for a power off, one engine gone glide.  This was one of those situations that they don't have figures and procedures for in the DC-3's thick operations manual.

"I'm gonna belly it in..." 

"Flaps?"

"NOOOOO...hell no, she's behaving now, lets not piss her off..."

I don't know if the field that the DC-3 basically picked for them had trees on the approach end, or maybe the inevitable road and power lines, or if it was surrounded by other fields, but however it was set up, Davis waited until the last minute to ease it out of the dive (Praying that the damaged left wing stayed with them as he did so), maybe babying the damaged plane over an obstruction before letting her pancake in on her belly, flaring...pulling the nose up...to slow them just a few feet off the ground.

  

This dumped their airspeed and she belly-flopped into the cotton, maybe getting one good solid bounce in before slamming back down and sliding across the field, throwing cotton plants and dirt clods aside as she went, finally slowing as she bounced across the rows. The right wing finally snagged on something, corkscrewing the plane around 170 degrees, and causing it to slide sideways for the last few yards of it's final landing.  As the DC-3 finally shuddered to a stop, the right engine gave up the ghost and dropped away from it's nacelle, burying the damaged prop beneath it as it landed.

They were down.

Somewhere between forty-five seconds and a minute passed between the collision and Davis' epic emergency landing, very likely the longest minute any of them would ever spend. With the exception of  Mrs Williams, whose two year old son was unconscious and gravely injured, Flight 45's seventeen passengers remained calm and didn't panic during that never-ending minute, even though they, too, had been bumped, bruised and knocked around by both the collision and the landing. With the exception of Mrs Williams and her son, the injuries were comparatively minor and, most importantly, all were able to get out of their seats with no assistance.

In the cockpit, Davis and Martindale snapped master switches and ignition off and pulled themselves out of their own seats, making their way to the cabin. While the actual term 'Un-ass the airplane' hadn't been coined yet, the concept sure existed, and, as downed airplanes had this unfortunate tendency to light off and burn like a torch, I can just about bet that very concept was already going through Davis, Martingale, and their unnamed flight attendants' minds. (There were two, one male and one female, aboard flight 45). A column of black smoke to their north, marking the site of the downed A-26, reinforced that concept.

 It's a good bet that the flight attendants already had the cabin door on the aft starboard side of the plane open by the time that Davis and Martindale emerged from the cockpit, One of them had probably already made the short jump from the cabin to the ground and they very likely already had the evacuation of the downed airliner well under way. The right wing had snagged the ground, so they were tilted to the right, making the cabin door even closer to the ground, so getting everybody off of and away from the plane was likely a pretty quick and painless process.

 Mrs. Williams was both inconsolable, and one of the two worst injured of the seventeen passengers...sadly, her little boy was the worst injured, and they knew that getting him to a hospital was their top priority. Thankfully the accident hadn't happened in a vacuum by any means...there had been several witnesses to the collision and the two crashes, and the land-owner of the property where the airliner bellied in was probably among the first on scene. I don't know if he had a phone yet, but if he did it was on a party line so if he did  have a phone, he was able to not only report the airliner's crash landing and location, he was also able to notify several neighbors of the crash while he was at it.

Citizens began showing up at the DC-3 crash scene within a quarter hour or less of the airliner's emergency landing, followed closely, more than likely, by a unit or two from the Darlington Fire Department. While I couldn't find anything concerning the emergency response it's a good bet that DFD faced a sudden quandary...two crash scenes within a couple of miles of each other...so they probably dumped the house, and very likely got some mutual aid assistance enroute while they were at it. The units...and car loads of citizens...that arrived at the cotton field where the DC-3 bellied in were pleasantly surprised to find an essentially intact airplane sitting in the middle of said field, no fire, and the passengers...most of them uninjured...standing in a group well away form the plane.

This pleasant surprise was stained, however, when they realized that the two year old Williams boy was gravely injured, and that his mom had received a nasty head injury as well. Keep in mind that it would be at least a quarter century before advanced prehospital care of any kind was available, and the most oft-used standard of care was 'Big Engine, Heavy Foot, Fast Trip To Hospital'. With that being said, I'm not even sure there was an ambulance on scene, meaning that Mrs Williams and her son could well have been bundled into the back seat of a car rather than loaded into an ambulance.  Whether they were transported by car or ambulance, the driver hauled ass for the nearest hospital, which would have been The McLeod Infirmary, a modern 200 bed hospital located in Florence, a good fifteen mile ride on back country and two lane state roads, so ambulance, or private vehicle, it was likely a fast and rough ride.

Sadly the Williams child died very shortly after arrival at the hospital, to become the only fatality on the airliner. His mom survived her injuries, and the three other injured passengers received minor bumps and bruises. The other baby and her mother were among the uninjured.

 It's a good bet that as soon as Captain Davis made sure his passengers were safe he found a phone somewhere and notified the Columbia Eastern Airlines office that they were down, in one piece, and sitting in the middle of a cotton field and then told them exactly where the cotton field...and the crumpled DC-3...might be found. Meanwhile, a couple of miles away, Lt Jones, who was also bruised and banged up but otherwise uninjured, had likely also managed to find a phone and officially notify his command at F.A.A.F of the collision and the location of the crash site, even as Darlington and possibly Florence firefighters attacked the burning nose section of the bomber and the very probable field/brush/woods fire that the crash had caused.

In Columbia, a couple of Eastern executives headed for Darlington after notifying the State Aviation board, who notified the C.A.B before also sending a team of investigators north. The Eastern officials arrived within two hours of the crash, followed closely by the State officials (Also coming form Columbia) and they were met a few hours later by C.A.B. investigators. The Army, of course, already had an investigative team on the ground at the scene of the A-26 crash by the time they arrived. They may not have had immediate access to the bomber's crash site though, due to the fire department operations. As soon as the fire was under control the Army investigators probably threw a cordon up around the bomber, allowing no one near it except for authorized Army personnel and, ultimately, the C.A.B. investigators.

This investigation would actually be a fairly quick and simple one, because once they interviewed the two pilots the cause of the collision became pretty obvious. In fact, both the civilian and Army investigators probably had a strong suspicion about exactly what had happened by the time another DC-3 picked Eastern Flight 45's remaining passengers up later that evening and continued the flight to Miami.

As those interviews were taking place the wreckage of the A-26 was photographed with the bodies of the two crewmen who went down with it still in place then, once the bodies were removed, investigators combed through the wreckage of both planes with the oft-noted fine tooth combs. While the nose section of the A-26 was nothing more than a pile of burned aluminum, the tail section was intact enough for them to examine it and note the damaged vertical stabilizer.

There wouldn't have been any paint transfer from the DC-3 to the bomber because of the airliner's unpainted aluminum finish. There was paint transfer from the bomber to the leading edge of the DC-3's left wing, and when the airliner's left engine was located the mangled cowling also showed paint transfer. I'll bet dinner at Applebees that it also bore the perfect indentation of the leading edge of the bomber's vertical stabilizer, so they knew what the points of impact were...the question was just exactly how that impact managed to occur.

The answer to that one was as age-old as it was simplistic. No one was watching where they were going...literally.

The first thing that the C.A.B. noted was the fact that both pilots were operating under what was then termed 'Contact Flight Rules''...what we call "VFR" or Visual Flight Rules today...therefore both pilots were responsible for seeing and avoiding other aircraft. They also noted that, because the DC-3 was flying in a straight, set course, and the A-26 was maneuvering in a way that would cause it to intersect with that course, the DC-3 had the right of way...and that's where things fell apart. See, in order to follow the rules of the road...and to avoid a collision if those rules aren't followed...the pilots of two aircraft have to be aware of each others existence.

In order to be aware each others existence, of course, our two pilots should have simply been what rules and regulations term 'Properly Vigilant' and looked outside of the cockpit in order to 'See and Avoid' each other. But that's the problem here... they didn't watch out for other aircraft, therefore, they didn't see or avoid each other.

Lets take a look at Lt Jones actions first, as his maneuver was both the most complicated and, arguably, was the maneuver that actually caused the mid-air. (My opinion there).  The maneuver they were carrying out had a very legitimate purpose as the RDF was an indispensable piece of navigation equipment back in the day and making sure it was working the way it was supposed to (And, if work had been done on it, that said work was done properly) was a top priority task. Usually in larger aircraft a radar operator, navigator, or co-pilot will handle duties such as this while the pilot flies the aircraft.

One problem though...on that particular training mission the A-26 was, essentially, a single pilot aircraft. The navigator/weapons officer who normally would have been part of the crew didn't seem to be aboard for this trip. If he had been, he would have been handling the RDF while Jones flew the plane. And there we have our problem...Jones was having to split his duties between flying the plane, and monitoring the RDF's gain meter while listening for the aural null signal. To make things even worse, they weren't in restricted airspace dedicated to military training, a fact that the C.A.B. noted when they stated that Jones should have been mindful of the possibility that there could be other aircraft in the vicinity.

And, of course, there was another aircraft in the vicinity. When I read the C.A.B. report's analysis of the mid-air it hit me that, when the A-26 banked into that final wide left hand turn, it probably flew across the DC-3's flight path, only a few of miles ahead of it...had Jones looked to his left as he crossed the DC-3's line of flight, he'd have seen it, and realized he needed to keep clear of it. But that's not the worst of it. Not by far.

As Jones came around into the last thirty seconds or so of the turn, he was flying towards the DC-3, at it's exact altitude and basically tracking it as he turned, Meaning that the airliner was all but dead ahead of him for almost thirty seconds, and within what the C.A.B. called the 'normal azimuth of vision'...the arc of sky that the pilot would have scanned had he been watching for other aircraft...for another 30 seconds prior to that, meaning that the airliner was all but dead ahead of him for nearly a full minute. But Jones wasn't scanning for other aircraft...he was focused on the RDF, until he got the null signal, and rolled out of the turn and saw the sun glinting off of the DC'3's natural aluminum finish only a football field or so away. And by then it was too late.

Now for Captain Davis. As awesome a job as he did after the mid-air, Eastern Airlines' Captain Davis bore his share of blame before the collision as well.

Trust me on this...during the War Years, every pilot of every airliner flying over the Continental U.S. including Captain Davis remembered what happened to American Airlines Flight 28, and that memory popped into focus any time they were anywhere near a military air field. Davis had also reportedly had a couple of near misses of his own involving Army pilots, so he modified his route, flying well west of the airway...and Florence Army Airfield's traffic pattern...because he'd decided that staying as far away from them as possible was a prudent thing to do.

With that thought in mind, the C.A.B. noted that he should have been mindful that, being that close to a military field, military aircraft would be transiting the very airspace he was flying through in order to access training areas, among other reasons. This being the case, they also noted, he also should have been keeping an eye out of the cockpit for other aircraft.  But he was distracted as well...they had begun their descent into Columbia, and he was preoccupied with the myriad little tasks that had to be completed in the fifteen or so minutes before they landed.

Because of this he, like the A-26 Pilot, missed two chances to see and avoid the bomber...first, when it crossed his flight path a few miles ahead of him, then in the last forty five seconds to a minute of it's turn, when it, too, was in Davis 'normal azimuth of vision'. Meaning that all he...or, for that matter, Martindale...would have had to have done was looked up and scanned, and he would have probably seen the bomber in time to climb above it's flight path, and make it a near miss...or even just a miss...rather than a mid-air.

Of course, Davis redeemed himself when he managed to put the damaged DC-3 down in one piece with only a single fatality, but that doesn't change the fact that he was partially responsible for putting them in that situation in the first place, not because of something he did do, but because of something he didn't do. He didn't let his eyes roam outside the cockpit, (and worse, neither did his second officer.) and not through ignorance or incompetence...Davis' actions immediately after the collision rule out any possibility that he was incompetent. He didn't look outside the cockpit due to a few minutes worth of good old distraction-driven negligence.

Meanwhile, aboard the A-26, another dose of distractions led to it's pilot committing the exact same act of negligence, and again, not through incompetence, but rather because he was trying to do too many things at the same time. 

It would be nice to be able to say that this was a one-off incident, and that distracted pilots are exceedingly rare, but sadly, that's not entirely true. Distracted flying accidents aren't anywhere near as common as distracted driving accidents, of course, and airline crashes caused by distracted pilots are rarer still, but they do happen. This is what caused the drafting and enacting of the 'Sterile Cockpit Rule' that bans non-flight-specific conversation in the cockpit of commercial aircraft during certain critical portions of the flight.

Of course, even with all the rules, regulations, and training in the world, there's no easy and absolute fix for this one, because, again, being distracted is a unshakable byproduct of human nature. Changing human nature, as we all know, is almost as easy as moving, say,  Mt Rushmore.

Has Mt Rushmore moved even an inch in the last century? No? Exactly.

We can just be thankful for the fact that fatal airline crashes have become a rare commodity, and that crashes caused by distractions are rarer still.

<***>NOTES, LINKS, AND STUFF<***>

If Life was always fair, and the fates always kind, Eastern's Capt Davis would be just as well remembered for putting his mortally wounded DC-3 down in a cotton field and saving all but one of his passengers as Sully is for making an Airbus pretend it was a flying boat.

But life, of course, isn't fair. Back in 1945, there was no Social Media, no YouTube, no Instant News, and no smart phones with Hi Res video capability to record events as they happened, so he got a bunch of Attaboys in newspaper articles, his passengers remembered him for saving their lives, The C.A.B. said 'Awesome job getting that thing down in one piece...but you're still partially at fault', and the incident was pushed aside by more pressing news of the day...there was a major World War still being fought as you may recall. As the years rolled by the incident ultimately dropped off of the historical radar until only a few serious historians and a few equally serious Aviation History and Aviation Archaeology buffs remember it.

The end result, of course, is that Sully got a major motion picture made about his landing while Davis got a blog post in a very minor history blog written seventy six years and change after the fact by a crotchety old guy. But that certainly doesn't minimize his feat...getting that DC-3 down was one hell of a job of flying.

All of that being said, had the C.A.B. report also been a victim of time and history, and not been available, the afore mentioned Crotchety Old Guy (That'd be Yours Truly) would have dropped this one in the 'Notes...' section of the last post as a two or so paragraph note, because there is very little available on line about it. There was an article on my genealogy site, and maybe one other news paper article and that was pretty much it. The C.A.B. report allowed me to flesh out the details about the mid-air itself as well as the findings of the investigation while giving me enough data and detail to allow me to speculate about the details I couldn't find in what I hope was a reasonable and intelligent manner.

As always, I hope I managed to make this one enjoyable and informative...Now, on to the notes!

<***>

This mid-air collision foreshadowed every crash caused by every person who ever blew through a light or crossed the center line while texting.

'How?' you ask. The technology needed to text just didn't exist seventy years ago so again...how???.

'Simple', I say...The A-26 pilot was distracted because he was preoccupied by the RDF receiver. 

And just what was the RDF receiver? An electronic device...just as every smart phone that some driver's staring at as he or she blows through a stoplight is an electronic device.

So this incident was very possibly one of the very first accidents, on land or in the air, whose root cause can be traced back to one of the pilots/drivers being distracted by an electronic device...a  problem that's become a deadly thorn in the side of every DMV or it's equivalent in the world.

<***>

Flight 28 wasn't the last midair collision involving an airliner and a military aircraft to occur in the U.S. during the 40s, and the decade's third and final such accident harked all the way back to the very first mid-air involving an airliner, twenty years earlier in San Diego. Both of those incidents involved a fighter pilot who was stunting, and both ended badly for everyone involved.

In another twist of irony, this incident also occurred in July and involved another Eastern Airlines flight which had also departed from Boston's Logan Airport. Eastern Flight 557 departed from Logan on the morning of July 30th, 1949...five years and small change after Flight 45's departure from that same airport...enroute to Memphis, Tennessee with several stops in between. Also mirroring Flight 45, Flight 557's first stop would be New York's LaGuardia, but there their route's and fates diverged.

Flight 557 departed LaGuardia at about 10 AM with 12 passengers aboard for a short, 45 minute hop to Wilmington Delaware with veteran Captain L. R. Matthews in command and 2nd Officer J. B. Simmons flying right seat. The weather was nice, visibility 10 plus miles, and it was promising to be a smooth, routine flight. They wouldn't climb higher that 2000 feet on the short hop between LaGuardia and Wilmington, so their 12 passengers would get an up close and personal look at the passing scenery that today's airline passengers miss out on.

Meanwhile, Navy Lt (J.G.) Robert Poe had launched from Washington, D.C.'s Anancostia Naval Air Station at 9:37 AM...twenty three minutes before Flight 557 departed form LaGuardia...flying a Grumman F6F Hellcat on a training and proficiency Flight. His destination was Quonset Point N.A.S in Quonset Point, Rhode Island. and his flight plan routed him northbound up the same Red 3 Airway that Flight 557 was using southbound. Lt Poe's flight plan called for a cruise speed of 185 knots and an enroute time of just about two hours.

Sometime in the midst of these two departures, a single engine Piper Super Cruiser took off from an airstrip somewhere in the vicinity of Chesterfield New Jersey. The Super Cruiser's a single engine, high wing, three place fabric covered aircraft that was an upgraded version of Piper's famed J-3 and J-5 Cubs. It was a docile, forgiving, and extremely popular aircraft that cruised at 105  MPH, stalled at 50 MPH, and could land almost anywhere. It was popular, beloved, and was absolutely no match for a Grumman Hellcat...so why would a Navy fighter pilot see the need to simulate a dogfight with one?

Maybe, an hour and a half or so into his flight he had gotten bored. Maybe he wanted to show off. Maybe he still hadn't worked all of that youthful 'Piss and Vinegar;' out of his system. But whatever the reason, when he spotted the also northbound Super Cub ahead of and about 1000 feet below him, Poe decided to 'Buzz' it. On his first pass he shot beneath it and hauled back on the stick, throttle fire walled and Pratt and Whitney R-2800 'Wasp' screaming as he went into a vertical climb just 100 feet ahead of the Super Cruiser, whose already startled pilot had a busy few seconds on his hands as he was tossed around by the fighter's wash.

He lost sight of the Hellcat but, emulating every fighter pilot who was ever involved in a dogfight, he craned his neck around to try to spot the Navy Fighter, maybe throwing the little Piper into a couple of 'S' turns so he could see behind him...and just as he suspected, Poe wasn't finished with him yet.

A Grumman F6F Hellcat, pictured in a climbing right turn just as the fighter that hit Flight 557 was. Note the three wing guns on the leading edge of each wing. When the F6F hit the DC-3, the airliner's left wing connected with the F6F's left wing just about at those gun bays, tearing most of the fighter's left wing off while also ripping away about 15 feet of the DC-3's left wing. Two of the fighter's guns fell just about straight down, giving investigators a good datum point to use in determining where the collision occurred. The fighter's pilot was either killed or rendered unconscious in the collision, then thrown clear as his aircraft tumbled after the collision.

Flight 557 reported over Freehold N.J...about 25 minutes out of Wilmington...at 10:17 AM, about six minutes later they were just over a mile southeast of Chesterfield NJ when the Hellcat made another pass at the Super Cruiser. Poe again came in from behind and beneath the Piper and hauled back on his stick, throwing the Hellcat into a climb...but this time he didn't go vertical, instead wracking the fighter over into a climbing right turn, throttle again fire walled. The Super Cruiser's pilot probably again spent a couple of busy seconds fighting the fighter's wash, but he managed to look up to see a DC-3 about 1000 feet above him, heading south...and his eyes went huge as he watched the Hellcat climb towards it on an obvious collision course.

The crew of the DC-3 never saw what hit them as the Hellcat came at them from ahead and below, moving from right to left in a 10 degree bank. The fighter's left wing slammed into the airliners left wing about 15 feet in from the tip at the same instant that it's prop shredded the airliner's left wingtip.
The DC-3's wing ripped into the fighters wing only a few feet out from the cockpit, right at it's gun bays, tearing two of the fighter's guns free to tumble straight down while also tearing the left wing away, leaving only a stub. Poe's head had slammed hard into the canopy when he hit the airliner, either knocking him unconscious or killing him instantly. He was thrown clear of the Hellcat as it tumbled and spun away from the collision, shedding parts as it fell to slam into the ground as a crumpled mass of bent aluminum about a half mile away from the point of impact with the DC-3. Poe's body was found about 200 feet away from the wrecked fighter. Though his 'chute burst open when he hit the ground, the ripcord had never been pulled.,

 Matthews and Simmons probably tried desperately to save the airliner, but with the outer fifteen or so feet of it's left wing gone,  it was also mortally wounded and inevitably fell into a graveyard spiral, slamming into the ground in a ball of fire about a mile beyond the collision point, killing all fifteen people aboard.

With a slew of eye witnesses, including and most particularly the pilot of the Piper Super Cruiser, this was another investigation that didn't take much time to close. Poe was judged to be completely at fault due to his blatant act of reckless flying, The report also went into detail in noting that aerobatics were absolutely forbidden in the vicinity of civilian aircraft and most definitely forbidden on a civilian airway.

This incident has fallen even further off the radar than Flight 45's Mid-air...I ran up on it's GenDisasters page and aviationsafety.net page while researching Flight 45, and a little digging gave me the C.A.B. report, but other than than, the well was dry on Flight 557's midair. It should be noted, BTW, that the Gen Disaster page's description of the mid-air...which was a contemporary news paper article...and the C.A.B. report differed greatly.

As well as being caused by reckless flying, it'd be easy to chalk this one up as another incident caused in part to the lack of regional air traffic control during that era...but this wouldn't be true

Why not?...

<***>

 Military air craft would be a hazard for commercial aircraft even after meaningful regional air traffic control was developed and instituted in the mid to late Fifties for the very simple reason that Civil Aviation and Military Aviation utilized two distinct and separate air traffic control systems, and the two systems did not communicate with each other. At. All.

This, of course, meant that when an airliner was on it's decent or climb-out into or out of a commercial airport or even at it's cruise altitude, a fighter on a training or ferry mission could just suddenly appear...and such incidents happened on a not even vaguely infrequent basis right on up to the early Seventies, causing several deadly mid-air collisions. This problem was finally mitigated in the early Seventies when regulations were  enacted requiring all aircraft operating in U.S.airspace, be they military or civilian, to operate under the same air traffic control authority.

 <***>

Had radar been available to civilian authorities in 1945, and been installed in control towers and utilized by Air Traffic Control it may have prevented Flight 45's mid-air...but then again it may not have. Of course we have the above-noted hazard that military aircraft presented even after radar was introduced, but we also have another problem that would have existed for Flight 45 had radar been available to Air Traffic Control back then. The controller would have had absolutely no idea who to warn.

Transponders...devices that allowed an aircraft to transmit a unique numeric code along with it's return on the radar scope...didn't exist yet, and Flight 45 left the airway without announcing it's intention to do so, so it's 'blip' would have been several miles west of where ti was supposed to have been, and therefore, unidentified. The A-26's blip would have been likewise unidentified.

Short of keying up and transmitting 'BOTH unidentified aircraft X miles west of Florence, make an immediate left turn!! (The DC-3 would have turned away from the bomber, which would have... Hopefully...gone behind the airliner ) and hoped both pilots realized he was talking to them in time to make the emergency maneuver. OF course, unless the A-26 was monitoring the civilian ATC frequency, he wouldn't have even heard it.

Yeah...I'm thinking it, too...they would have most likely still collided.

<***>LINKS<***>

With so little information about Flight 45 out there, and even less about Flight 557 (That one doesn't even have a Wiki Page) there aren't a whole lot of links either..but I do have the links for the C.A.B. reports from both incidents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_45   Flight 45's Wiki Page. It's actually pretty sparse, and is pretty much a repeat of the contemporary newspaper article that comprises the incident's GenDisasters page.

http://specialcollection.dotlibrary.dot.gov/Document?db=DOT-AIRPLANEACCIDENTS&query=%28select+320%29   The text of the C.A.B. Report. There's also a link to a PDF version of the report, which is downloadable.`

https://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19490730-0   Flight 557's AviationSafety.net Page.
Aviationsafety,net has an enormous database of air crashes, with the raw, basic info about all, and some pretty informative narratives about several.

http://specialcollection.dotlibrary.dot.gov/Document?db=DOT-AIRPLANEACCIDENTS&query=(select+442)  Text of the C.A.B. report for Eastern Flight 557's mid-air.  Like Fight 45's report, a link for the downloadable PDF version is also included.

American Airlines Flight 28 The Infamous Palm Springs Mid-Air

American Airlines Flight 28...October 23, 1943

A Deadly Greeting, A Surprise Witness, And A Jinxed Bomber

You'd really think that the 1929 San Diego mid-air collision, which occurred when an Army Air Corps fighter collided with a Maddux Air Lines Ford Trimotor while stunting, killing six people and destroying two airplanes while coming scary-close to taking out part of a residential neighborhood, would have been a major wake-up call for the Military Aviation community.  It was a huge story when it happened, and the negative publicity it generated put the dangerous tendency of military pilots to perform aerobatics while flying near civilian aircraft under a microscope. The resultant pressure from the Media, the public, and the airlines to do something about the problem would have been tremendous, and I have a sneaking suspicion that the military brass cracked down hard on that tendency in the weeks immediately following the crash.

This crack-down very likely created a textbook example of a phenomenon popularly known as 'Crap Runs Downhill'. Preemptive chewing outs would have flowed from the command staff to base commanders to squadron commanders to flight leaders to the individual pilots, gaining momentum with each until the briefings in squadron ready rooms throughout the land very likely made the rantings of R. Lee Ermey's iconic Sgt. Hartman in 'Full Metal Jacket' sound like a Gospel song.

Pilots were probably told, in no uncertain terms, that exceeding a given angle of bank within a couple of miles of a civilian aircraft would result in punishments the likes of which they didn't even want to think about, much less actually experience.

And for about 12 years, at least as far as records indicate, these threats actually seemed to work. But then something extraordinary happened...and I don't mean extraordinary in a good way.

 What was this extraordinarily bad event? I'll give you a hint.  

December 7th, 1941

That's right...the infamous December morning when the Japanese Navy managed to, as one of their own admirals put it, 'Awaken A Sleeping Giant And Fill Him With A Terrible Resolve'. And trust me on this...that Sleeping Giant was pissed and out for blood when he woke up!

When those bombs and torpedoes started falling and running on that Hawaiian Sunday morning three-quarters of a century ago they plunged the U.S. into a war the likes of which the world had never before conceived of even in it's darkest nightmares, and which we, hopefully, will never ever see the likes of again. Here in the U.S. patriotism and a desire for vengeance were both running high, and with-in the first few months of our entry into the war, tens of thousands of young men had enlisted, and they kept on enlisting. By the end of 1942, the four branches of the Armed Forces (Army, Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard) counted just over 1.8 million men in their ranks...a number that would swell to over twelve million by the war's end.

Even as young men flooded recruitment centers, all of America's industry went to a total war footing, and with-in a couple of months of our entry into the war factories began turning out the machines of war...from bayonets to battleships...in record numbers.

Aircraft production shot up something on the order of 1000%...and yes, you read that right. Want proof? Lets just look at wartime aircraft production. Anyone want to guess how many airplanes U.S. manufacturers turned out between January 1942 and August 1945? Anyone? Bueller? Bueelller??

If you guessed 200,000, you were still short by nearly a hundred grand. There were just shy of 300,000 airplanes built in the US during the three years and eight months we were involved in the war. That comes out to 6,818 planes per month. To put that in perspective, the modern day annual production of airplanes in the US...of all types...falls well short of half of that figure.

To get all of those planes in the air, the same number of pilots...or at least very close there-to...had to be trained to fly them. Those tens of thousands of kids...and most were just that, kids between 17 and 22 or 23 years old...who enlisted in the U.S. Armed Forces during the first few months of the war? A huge percentage of them wanted wings on their uniforms, and the task of training those who made the grade and became Army...or Navy...or Marine...aviators turned into a pretty daunting task. Over the course of the war, 193,000 new pilots were trained by the Army Air Force alone. The Navy and Marines added thousands of their own pilots to the mix. This would put a lot of inexperienced pilots in the air flying high performance aircraft.

To get all of these new pilots trained and in the air in the first place, they needed airfields. Of course, all of the service branches already had air bases, but nowhere near enough of them, so more than a few existing civilian fields were taken over...in whole or in part...by the military while hundreds of new fields were built to accommodate the nation's rapidly expanding air forces. One of these new bases was in Palm Springs, California...the airfield that, in fact, still exists in greatly expanded and modernized form as Palm Springs International Airport.

But in October of 1942, it was an almost brand new Army air field, bursting at the seams with both aircraft and pilots...both seasoned veterans and starry-eyed new recruits...lots of starry-eyed new recruits, and...it's not where we're going just yet. Oh, we're staying in Southern California And we'll end up in Palm Springs...but first we've got to join a conversation between two friends.

We're going back to the evening of Oct 22nd...the evening before the accident I'm posting about here...to a restaurant somewhere in Long Beach, where a young American Airlines pilot named Louis Reppert and an Army Air Force pilot named William Wilson were eating some dinner, downing a few brews and telling tales. The two had trained together some time back and became friends in the process, though their paths had diverged with Fred Reppert (His middle name was Frederick) going with a career with American Airlines while Bill Wilson signed up for the full hitch in the Army Air Corps, which ended up being for 'The Duration'...until the war ended, when ever it might end.

Bill Wilson had probably wanted fighters...all aspiring military aviators want fighters, no matter what service branch they go with. Really, no one really wants bombers, and no one wants transports, but Wilson ended up getting Air Transport Command and being stationed at Long Beach. At least he was attached to Ferrying Command...the command tasked with transferring aircraft from one base to the other...so he got to fly a variety of aircraft. The next day, in fact, he and another pilot were to ferry a Lockheed B-34 Ventura medium bomber from Long Beach Army Airfield to the Palm Springs Army airfield at about the same time that Fred Reppert was to fly right seat on American Airlines Flight 28 from L.A. to New York, with a stop-over in Phoenix. Flight 28's routing to Phoenix took them through San Gorgonio Pass so they could safely clear several peaks that soared well above their cruise altitude, and this would, in turn, take them to with-in spitting distance of Palm Springs.

It was a good bet that Wilson would also 'Fly The Pass' into Palm Springs. This would potentially put both the B-34 that Wilson was ferrying and American Flight 28 in the same area at fairly close to the same time.

Reppert and Wilson picked up on this as they discussed their schedules, and once they realized they'd be in the air at about the same time and potentially in the same general area, a plan began to take shape. At first the two of them discussed just clicking their mikes at each other, this having been a time-honored aerial greeting for as long as radios had been standard equipment aboard commercial and military aircraft. A quick review of the frequencies available to the American Airlines pilot shot that idea down, however, when they realized that the two aircraft shared no common frequencies.

No problem, then...they'd just wag their wings at each other. Of course that would mean that the two planes would have to be close enough together for each pilot to see the other wag his aircraft's wings so he could return the greeting. But that wouldn't be that dangerous...I mean, if all they were going to do was wag their wings at each other, what could go wrong??

They discussed it, decided that the wing-wag was the way to go, shot the bull as they finished their beers, paid the check, tipped the waitress, and parted company until their next meeting, over Palm Springs. Said meeting, however, would not go as planned.

*

October 23rd, 1942 dawned as one of those classic Southern California days...skies of a dazzling blue with a few puffy clouds here and there, warm temps, light winds...both on the ground and aloft...and flying conditions that were just about Webster's definition of 'C.A.V.U. (Ceiling and Visibility Unlimited).  In Los Angeles nine people started jumping through all the hoops that getting ready for an afternoon departure on a cross country flight requires

Keep in mind that back in that era air travel was crazy expensive. A cross country airline ticket could cost as much as a month's salary for a middle class American, making it pretty much the domain of the business traveler (With the flight paid for by the passenger's employer), the wealthy, and the famous (Who, of course, also tended to be wealthy).

Also, well before 1942 was over, serious war-time restrictions on civilian air travel had been put in place. Pleasure flying as well as tourism of any description came to a virtual standstill for the duration of the war. The Air Transport Command...still an integral part of the Military today...was organized during World War II, and all but took over the airlines, meaning that any civilian flying commercial was doing so in some capacity that was beneficial to the war effort. So. even though October 23rd was a Friday, none of the people who arrived at Burbank's Lycoming Air Terminal that afternoon were flying out for a casual weekend get-away... all nine of the passengers who who'd be boarding American Airlines Flight 28 had a good reason to be flying.

Whatever their reasons for traveling on that lovely SoCal fall day, they also had a celebrity in their midst. One of Flight 28's nine passengers was a seriously talented...as in Oscar-winning level talented...Hollywood composer named Ralph Rainer. Mr. Rainer had penned several major hits of the era, including the classic Blue Hawaii, a cover of which became the title track for the Elvis Presley flick of the same name. While he was at it, Rainer also wrote 'Love In Bloom', which would become Jack Benny's theme song, and 'Thanks For The Memories', which Bob Hope would snag as his theme song. He, along with Flight 28's other eight passengers and three crew members were beginning their last hour on earth as they boarded the American Airlines DC-3 at about 4:15 PM

For the moment though, we're going to leave our nine doomed passengers as Fred Reppert, along with Captain Charles Pedley, preflighted the big Douglas DC-3 while pretty 25 year old stewardess Estelle Reagan made sure all was ready in the passenger cabin and galley. When we leave them we're heading about 40 miles south, to Long Beach Army Airfield, still in existence today as Long Beach International Airport, and home back then of the Air Transport Command's ferrying division where Bill Wilson, along with 25 year old Sgt. Robert Leicht, were preflighting B-34 Ventura Bureau # 41-38116...the bird that they were ferrying to Palm Springs.

A Lockheed B-34 Ventura similar to BuNo 41-38116, the B-34 piloted by Bob Wilson that struck and downed American Airlines Flight 28. 

The B-34 was a light bomber based on the popular Lockheed Lodestar airliner. At just over 50 feet long with a wingspan of 65 feet it was smaller than the DC-3, but was nearly 100 MPH faster.  The B-34 cruised at 230MPH (Same as the DC-3’s top speed) and topped out at 322 MPH.

Take a look at the B-34’s nose and cockpit, and imagine a plane the size of the DC-3 just ahead, to the right, and below it and you get an idea of why neither Wilson or Leicht could see it, once they inadvertently put it in the B-34’s ‘Ahead and Below’ blind spot, until they hit it. That doesn’t even come close, however, to excusing them for getting in that situation in the first place.

Wilson's log book showed a total of nearly 1500 hours in the air, but only eighteen of them were in the B-34...and of those eighteen, only nine were as pilot in command.  Leicht was so new at flying he shined...only 100 hours, most of it during primary and advanced training, Their lack of familiarity with the aircraft just might have had a little bit of bearing on what was about to happen.

This wouldn't be a long flight...well under an hour at the B-34's cruise speed of 230 MPH...and as they did the walk-around inspection, Bill Wilson very likely told Leicht about his conversation with Fred Reppert the previous evening along with their plan to meet up in the air, also telling his co-pilot jokingly that he'd like to 'Thumb His Nose' at Reppert. The two of them discussed  just what they'd have to do to make the aerial meeting happen. With the B-34...Also known as the PV-1 Ventura/PV-2 Harpoon in Naval service as a patrol bomber...being way faster than the DC-3, as long as they could spot them, they could catch them.

SO sometime around 4:20 PM Bob Wilson set magnetos, throttles,  and mixture, called 'CLEAR!! through the bomber's open left cockpit window, and hit the starter for the # 1 engine, sending first exhaust-snorts, then the distinctive roar of a Pratt and Whitney R-2800 radial engine across the field. He repeated the procedure for the #2 engine, asked for and received taxi clearance, then released the brakes and cracked the throttles, sending the B-34...which, due to it's potbellied, slab-sided fuselage looked for all the world like it was pregnant... rolling across the field towards the active runway.

At 4:26 PM, according to records, Bill Wilson lifted the B-34 off of Long Beach's active runway. He called for 'Gear Up, asked for and received clearance for a departure to the east, then eased the bomber into a turn that would put it on a rough course for Palm Springs. Except they weren't going to Palm Springs...not directly anyway.

I can just about bet that, as they lifted off and headed just about due east east, Wilson and Leicht were discussing the fact that they were in the air a good ten minutes before Flight 28's scheduled departure time. The flight from Long Beach to Palm Spring is well under an hour. If they didn't dawdle a little, they'd be on the ground well before the airliner overflew Palm Springs.

Not a problem! Wilson banked them gracefully to the left, and headed for March Field, which, as well as being one of California's larger bases and one of the oldest military airfields in the country, was also just south of the route Flight 28 would use to enter San Gongonio Pass.

Wonder if, as they headed for March Field, they discussed things like the huge blind spot that the B-34 (And any large aircraft) had in front of and below it, and what effect that had on flying close formation with another fairly large aircraft? Naaaa...probably not.

*

American Airlines flew some seriously sharp looking ships back in that era, using the same basic livery right on through the 1960s, and a version of it until about 2009. Their DC-3s were finished in natural aluminum with a bright orange shield splashed across the nose and a narrow orange lightning bolt running the length of the fuselage just beneath the cabin windows. The control surfaces were trimmed in orange, and the scheme was finished off with the cowl ring...the forward most portion of the engine nacelles...also trimmed in orange.  American Airlines name and classic circular Eagle logo were emblazoned across the aft portion of the fuselage, just ahead of the horizontal stabilizer, with the term 'Flagship'...as all their DC-3s were known...above the cabin windows.  The ship's name... American named all of their planes back than, as did most airlines...was emblazoned across the nose beneath the lightning bolt, with 'American Airlines, in slightly larger script, above it. The DC-3 assigned to Flight 28 had been christened Flagship Connecticut.

The Flagship Connecticut was gleaming in the late afternoon sun as Flight 28's nine passengers walked across the concrete apron and climbed the short set of boarding stairs on the aft starboard side, walked uphill (The DC-3 was...and indeed is, as several hundred of them are still in the air...a taildragger.) and took their seats.  The DC-3 was a 21 seat airplane, so they'd have plenty of room, and she'd be light when she took off.

An immaculately restored...and better yet, airworthy...American Airlines DC-3 all but identical to the ill-fated Flagship Connecticut. The Douglas DC-3 had already become the workhorse of the airlines by 1942, and would become one of the most famous airplanes of all time. It, along with the smaller DC-2 that birthed it, was by and large the prototype for the modern airliner.  The DC-3 was 65 feet long with a 95 foot wingspan and could cruise at just shy of 210 MPH. It was also a very comfortable...even luxurious...airliner, with an off-set center aisle between two abreast seating on the left side of the aircraft, and a single seat beneath each window on the right in a 93" wide cabin that allowed it's passengers to stand up. The DC-3 also boasted a small galley and a lavatory aft.

While 607 actual DC-3s were built, just over 10,100 C-47s...the military version of the DC-3...were built during the war, making it one of the most prolific aircraft ever produced and flooding the post-war market with surplus transports that could be bought, then converted to a civilian airliner, for maybe a quarter of the cost of a new airplane. Lots of airlines got their start flying DC-3s, and lots of established airlines flew them on regional routes well into the 1950s.

With that being said...the Air Force flew the C-47 until 2008. The DC-3 was and indeed, is, a legitimate flying legend.

.

  Flight 28's passengers grabbed seats, Estelle Reagan went through the flight safety speech that's been a part of air travel for eighty or so years, and Charles Pedley hit the ignition and starters for the two big Wright Cyclone radials, kicking them over with the stuttering roar and clouds of blue smoke that big radial engines are known for.

He contacted Lockheed's tower, got permission to taxi, then take-off clearance and at 1636, lifted off of the active runway. They were immediately cleared for both a departure to the east, and a climb to the flight's cruise altitude of 9000 feet, just about exactly ten minutes after Bill Wilson lifted the B-34 off of Long Beach's active runway with very similar clearances.

There was, very likely, one big difference, though. While Bill Wilson and his copilot had discussed the plan to meet up with the airliner at some length, it's speculated that Fred Reppert never even mentioned the plan to Charles Pedley, and in fact, may have even forgotten about it.

There are two trains of thought on that subject, though. The other train of thought is that Reppert did mention the plan to Pedley, but Pedley forbade any kind of show of recognition or anything else that would tempt the Army pilot to fly dangerously close to the airliner.

Whichever one actually happened, the outcome ended up being the exact same.

Of course, if Bill Wilson had flown directly from Long Beach to Palm Springs, Flight 28 would have probably still been 30 or so miles out when the B-34's wheels chirped onto Palm Spring Army Airfield's runway. They were, after all, at least ten minutes ahead of the airliner, and if they had flown directly to Palm Springs Army Airfield, nothing would have happened in the first place.  The problem was, Wilson didn't consider just forgetting about the rendezvous and flying directly to Palm Springs an option, nor did he consider the fact that they were ten minutes ahead of Flight 28 a major problem.  He'd already worked out a solution to that problem that was elegant in it's simplicity.

As noted above, the airliner's course to Phoenix would take it north of Palm Springs, and of March Field, which was only also very slightly north of the Bomber's course. So, very shortly after departing Long Beach and climbing to his assigned cruise altitude of 4,000 feet, Wilson eased the B-34 into a gentle left turn, putting them on a course that would take them west of March Field. They put March Field a couple of miles off their right wing tip, flew a couple of more miles north, then Wilson told his co-pilot to 'Keep your eyes peeled for the airliner.' as he banked the bomber into a wide circle in the sky, taking them close to Riverside to the west and Moreno Valley to the East. They had made two circles when one of them spotted the sun glinting of of all of that polished aluminum...

*

Back in the pre-radar, pre-regional air traffic control era that 1942 was smack dab in the middle of it was up to the individual airlines to keep tabs on their flights, therefore each airline had regional dispatch centers that the crews were required to keep in touch with during their flight. All these dispatch centers did was keep tabs on their position and relay weather information...they had no way of knowing where any other airlines' planes (Or military aircraft) were so they couldn't provide actual air traffic control services.

One of American Airlines' regional dispatch centers was in Burbank and at just about 1702...5:02PM...Fred Reppert contacted Burbank and advised them that they were over Riverside, California at their assigned cruise altitude of 9,000 feet, and would be over their next reporting point...Indio, California...at 1722. Only thing was, they'd never make it to Indio.

A Map showing the approximate flight paths pf both aircraft, and the locations and time line of the events leading to and just after the collision. Click on the map to see it full size.

1)       B-34 BuNo 41-38116 takes off from long Beach Army Airfield (Now Long Beach International Airport) at 4:26 PM, enroute to Palm Springs. Wilson has told his copilot, Sgt Leicht, of the plan to meet up with Flight 28, and exchange wing-wags. They are ten minutes ahead of Flight 28

2)       American Airlines Flight 28 takes off from Lockheed Air Terminal, in Burbank (Now Bob Hope Airport) at 4:36 PM, heading for Phoenix…10 minutes after the B-34 departs from Long Beach…and climbs to it’s cruise altitude of 9000 feet.

3)       Wilson, flying at 4000 feet, makes a course change, taking him north and west of March field, then begins a wide circle between Riverside and Moreno Valley in order to allow Flight 28 to catch up with them.  Wilson tells Sgt Leicht to keep an eye out for the DC-3. Guestimating here, it’s probably about 4:50 PM or a little after.

4)       At 5:02 PM, Flight 28 contacted their Dispatch office/Flight Service Center in Burbank to report that they were over Riverside, and expected to report over Indio at 5:22 PM.

5)       After two circles and possibly the beginning of a third, Sgt Leicht spots Flight 28, 5000 feet above them, at about the time that or slightly after Flight 28 makes their position report, They probably allow the DC-3 to over-fly them to confirm it's the right plane, then Wilson begins a high performance climb to catch the DC-3

6)       Wilson catches up with Flight 28 at about the same time both planes are entering San Gorgonio Pass, which at the time all aircraft flying in and out of the L.A. area had to fly through to clear Mt San Jacinto to the south and Mt San Gorgonio to the north.

7)       Wilson pulls even with the DC-3, about 1.5 miles to its left and wags his wings, getting no response. After asking Leicht if he saw any sign of recognition and getting a ‘No’, he decides to…

8)       …pull ahead of the DC-3 , climbing to a slightly higher altitude, cross over to the other side of the DC-3’s flight path, then throttle back, allowing the DC-3 to catch up with him. The B-34 is a quarter mile or less to the right of the DC-3 at this point.

9)       Still getting no sign that Reppert saw them, Wilson decides to close the distance between the two aircraft, and begins a turn to the left. In the process he loses sight of the DC-3.

10)   Having lost situational awareness and not realizing he’s already slightly to the left of, above and behind the DC-3, but deciding that he’s probably closer to it than he intended, Wilson belatedly decides to abandon the rendezvous. He rolls out of his turn, he and Leicht briefly look for the DC-3, then Wilson trims for his decent to Palm Springs and begins a descending turn to the right…almost immediately the B-34’s right propeller strikes and shreds the DC-3’s vertical stabilizer…

11)   ... The B-34 is kicked upward and to the left, the DC-3 very briefly rises about 20 feet, stalls, falls off to the left, and enters a flat spin. Burbank receives a message ‘Flight 28 from Burbank…CORRECTION…Burbank From Flight 28’ at 5:15 PM. Burbank tries to contact them with no success, along with the Phoenix and Tucson dispatch offices. Flight 28 had, at that point, impacted a ridge and caught on fire, killing all 12 passengers and crew aboard.

12)   Leicht calls in a mayday to Palm Springs Army Airfield while Wilson briefly fights the slightly damaged bomber. Wilson quickly finds throttle and trim settings that keep the B-34 under control, and makes a normal descent and landing at Palm Springs Army Airfield (Now Palm Springs International Airport).

The bomber's crew probably spotted the airliner a minute or so either side of their position report, as it overflew Riverside. Even as Reppert was handling the position report, Pedley made a couple of minor course adjustments that would allow them to split the middle down San Gorgonio Pass...the same route that I-10 takes through the San Bernardino mountains today...and fly safely between 10,000 foot Mt San Jacinto and 11,500 foot Mt San Gorgonio.

Flight 28 was probably cruising at right around 200 MPH and approaching San Gorgonio Pass as Bill Wilson started climbing towards them. They were only ten or fifteen minutes out from Palm Springs Army Airfield at that point, so the prudent and sensible thing for Wilson to have done would have been to say 'I guess I'll have to catch up with Fred next time he's in L.A.', and break off the rendezvous, but then again, if he'd done the prudent and sensible thing, I wouldn't be writing this.

Wilson, instead, pointed the bomber's bulbous nose skyward, trimmed her up for best rate of climb (About 2200 feet per minute) and let her eat up airspace. He probably started climbing towards the airliner a couple of minutes after Fred Reppert gave their position report, after they had confirmed that it was probably Flight 28, then reached the DC-3's 9000 foot cruise altitude two minutes and change later...just as both planes entered San Gorgonio Pass. The Pass is just under ten miles long, at 200 MPH it would take the two planes right at three minutes to pass through it. It would be a very eventful, hectic, and tragic three minutes.

Wilson leveled off at 9000 feet, a mile and a half or so to the left of, and slightly behind the DC-3. I have a feeling that both Wilson and his copilot were looking over towards the airliner as Wilson jockeyed the throttles, putting them even with the DC-3. As he'd agreed the evening before, Wilson gently turned the control wheel first to the left, then to the right, then repeated, wagging the wings several degrees up then down. The two of them continued to gaze at the DC-3 as it glittered in the sun...

"...You think he sees us?" Probably from Wilson. There was likely an insightful pause for a few seconds as Sgt. Leicht, who had a more direct view of the airliner out of his window, gazed at the distant glittering dab of silver.

"Doesn't look like it..."  And Wilson missed a second chance to do something sensible. Instead of throttling back to let the airliner pull away from them, and trimming for their approach to Palm Springs as the DC-3 became a distant and rapidly disappearing silver dot in the sky ahead of them, he probably said something like 'We'll see about that', shoved the throttles forward and eased back on the control yoke, giving them another couple of dozen yards of altitude as he pulled away from the airliner, banking into a gentle right turn as he did so.

He was still climbing at a shallow angle as he crossed the airliner's nose, probably a quarter to a half mile ahead of it and very likely far enough above the DC-3 that it's upper windshield frame and cockpit overhead effectively hid the bomber from view. Wilson had a plan in mind to get Reppert's attention, but he'd have to work fast. By now he could probably see Palm Springs in the near distance, ahead and to his right. By all rights he should have been setting up for his descent and approach but instead he leveled off and throttled back to let the airliner overtake him on his left.

Now it was Wilson's turn to watch the DC-3 ease up next to and slightly below them, still a quarter mile or so to their left. The bomber was now to the right of the DC-3, so if Reppert looked out of his cockpit window, he'd see the bomber, and to be honest, this close to both a very active wartime air base and a commercial airport, he probably should have been scanning the surrounding skies a bit...but I don't think Wilson ever gave him a chance to do so.

We'll never know if Pedley and Reppert ever actually saw the bomber or not, or if Reppert had informed Pedley of the planned aerial meeting. If he had informed Pedley of the meeting, and if Pedley did see the bomber, it's a good bet that he flat out refused to participate in what was an unforgivably reckless maneuver.  It's also all but a sure bet that if Pedley did see the bomber he was saying something to the effect of  'What the hell is this idiot doing now???" as Wilson pulled ahead of them, crossed over, then allowed them to pull even with them.

It was also at about this point that Wilson decided that he was still too far from the DC-3, so he banked into a gentle left turn, babying the throttles forward a bit as well so the airliner wouldn't get too far ahead of them...

You know the blind spot all cars have in front of them...the one that actually hides ten or more feet of the road/parking lot/what have you directly in front of you. Now imagine that the hood of your car was ten or fifteen feet long, that your windshield was only about a third as tall as it actually is, and that you were in the air. Just exactly how big would that blind spot be?

Bill Wilson was about to find the answer to that question as, somewhere during this gentle turn that was meant to bring him closer to the airliner, he realized that he'd lost sight of it, Not only had he lost sight of it, he'd lost all situational awareness...he though he was still to the right of the DC-3 when, in reality, he'd already overflown it and was to the left of it. On top of that, as he turned, the airliner had pulled away from him, but only very slightly.

What he did know was that he suddenly couldn't see the DC-3 even though he was in a left turn and, as far as he knew heading towards it, which meant he was getting closer to it by the second. When he realized this he immediately rolled out of the turn and looked out of his cockpit window.

No Airliner.

He probably asked Leicht if he could see the DC-3, but Leicht couldn't see it either.

They couldn't see it because they'd managed to pull one of those 'You couldn't have done that if you'd tried' tricks. As they overflew the DC-3's flight path while it very slowly pulled away from them, then rolled out of their turn, they managed to tuck themselves in close formation with the airliner. They were maybe a hundred or so feet behind, to the left of, and very slightly above the DC-3, and in a perfect position for the entire airliner to be in a huge blind spot that hid it from both Wilson and Leicht. And, as they were flying on a parallel course to the airliner, at a slightly higher speed, they were also very slowly over taking it

Wilson didn't know this, of course, even though the DC-3 was less than a hundred feet from him...he did know that he had been turning to the left, towards the DC-3 when he lost sight of it, which meant that he probably needed to turn to the right...like now...to put some breathing room between them and it. Ironically, he also decided to abandon the rendezvous. He trimmed for his descent towards Palm Springs, throttled back and banked to the right, into a sweeping turn, he thought, away from the airliner...

...the problem was, by then he'd caught up with the DC-3 and may have even been slightly overlapping it, which meant he wasn't turning away from it...he was turning into it.  As for Pedley and Reppert, they either figured that the bomber crew had decided to call off their little stunt and head for Palm Springs, or never even knew the bomber was there in they first place.

...As Wilson started his turn to the right he may have even reached for the radio mike to request landing clearance from the tower at Palm Springs Army Airfield, visible ahead of them and to their right, but he never even got to unclip it.

A sudden double-barreled, clanging ' PA-PANG!!!'  rang out to their right even as the bomber was jolted upward and to the left. Sgt Leicht's head jerked around to the right as the impact's clanging resounded through the cockpit, and his eyes went huge as he glanced out of his side window and down...I can almost bet he yelled the classic scatological oath of surprise before he exclaimed 'We hit the airliner!!!' in a tone of shocked, horrified surprise...

Wilson probably said something like 'Say what?? even as he got real busy for a second or two as the bomber began shuddering and shaking, and trying to roll slightly to the right...then I know both of them probably yelled the aforementioned oath as the DC-3, now minus most of it's vertical stabilizer rose up almost even with their altitude, well less than 100 feet in front of them

'Our right prop got their rudder...' Leicht may have said to Wilson, who was busily hauling back on the yoke and feeding in power, praying that he still had usable power on his right side as, against every instinct he had, he turned in to what he knew was a damaged engine. The airliner, after rising just enough to make Wilson regain religions he'd never even practiced, shuddered and fell off to the left, it's shredded tail starting a slow rotation around to the right as it entered a flat spin, sun glinting off of the fuselage as it turned..

"Call Palm Springs...declare an emergency!" Wilson likely told Leicht as he backed the power off on the right engine to a point where the vibration all but stopped. The engine still wasn't sounding overly pleased with them, but least they weren't going to fall out of the sky, Wilson still had a feeling that it wouldn't be a bad idea to get back on the ground, like right then. Next to him, Sgt Leicht had snagged the radio mike...

While the actual radio traffic has, of course, been lost to history, it may have been something like:

"Palm Springs Tower, Palm Springs Tower, Army 116, MAYDAY, MAYDAY, MAYDAY!!!

In the elevated control tower cab at Palm Springs Army Airfield, a controller dived for the desk mike, reaching for notepad and pencil even as he keyed up

"Go ahead, Army 116.

"Palm Springs, Army 116 has been involved in a mid-air with an airliner approximately two to three miles northwest of the field...Army 116 is under control with damage to our starboard engine and wing. Requesting an immediate straight in approach...

"Army 116, you're cleared for any runway...we'll get the rigs rolling for you..."  Even as they scrambled to clear the pattern and get crash trucks rolling, and make notifications you know they looked out of the control tower cab's windows, gazing to the north west to see if they could spot the damaged bomber. I can't help but wonder if the blinking flash of the sun glinting off of Flight 28's polished aluminum skin also caught their eye as it spun.

*

Charles Pedley and Fred Reppert were seven minutes from their next checkpoint at Indio,  checking time and navigation instruments as well as spotting landmarks , the most prominent of which was a couple of miles off of their right wing tip...10,000 foot high Mt San Jacinto. You can bet that all nine of Flight 28's passengers were likely gazing in awe at the spectacle of the peak's spectacular north face soaring a thousand feet higher than their own altitude.  Fred Reppert may have even glanced out at it, despite the fact that he'd flown this same route several times before...even spectacular beauty can become old hat if you see it often enough.

The North Face of Mt San Jacinto...this was the sight that greeted crew and passengers as the transited San Gorgonio Pass, though their view was even more spectacular as they were closer and at an altitude of 9,000 feet.

They never really knew what happened, though if they had seen the bomber, you can bet that Pedley probably yelled something like 'That freaking idiot hit us!!!' when a sudden sharp jolt and clanging bang aft was accompanied by the rudder pedals suddenly going mushy beneath his feet. The ship started yawing from sided to side before suddenly rising about 20 feet, dumping most of it's airspeed, then dropping it's left wing and starting a slow rotation around it's nose as it fell straight down on almost an even keel. By the time the nose rotated around so it was pointing back west, they'd already lost at least a couple of hundred feet of altitude, so they probably never saw the bomber, which was above and behind them by then, after it hit them.

The passengers likely freaked out, but in the cockpit both Pedley and Reppert tried to keep their composure, and probably tried to recover from the spin...they had no idea exactly what had just happened, or how badly they were damaged. One of the two of them grabbed the radio mike and keyed up as they dropped faster and faster.

"Flight 28 from Burbank...CORRECTION!!..Burbank from Flight 28..."

In the Burbank American Airlines office, one of the radio operators looked at the speaker for an instant...Flight 28 wasn't due for a position report for another five minutes or so, and besides the voice crackling over the speaker sounded strained. He glanced up at a wall clock as he stepped on the foot pedal that keyed his desk mike. 5:15 PM

"Go ahead, Flight 28..."  No answer. " Go ahead Flight 28!" No answer. A cold chill fell over the personnel in the office as the radio operator tried once more.  People who have worked for years in aviation can usually sense when something bad had happened, and this had 'BAD' written all over it. He grabbed a phone and notified a supervisor of what had happened as, in the background, both the Phoenix and Tuscon offices also tried to call flight 28, with equally little success.

The DC-3, still in a flat spin and dropping straight down on an even keel, shed it's entire tail just a second or so before it slammed into a ridge north and east of Mt San Jacinto, about three miles from Palm Springs Army Airfield. Eyewitnesses said it bounced upward twenty or so feet, then slammed back down and erupted into a fireball as it's fuel tanks ruptured, sending a column of black smoke roiling skyward. All nine passengers as well as Pedley, Reppert and stewardess Estelle Reagan were killed instantly as the airliner slammed into the ground.

At least two people actually saw the collision, a couple more saw the fireball as the plane impacted the ridge, and the Palm Springs Army Airfield tower had gotten report of the crash, so Palm Springs Fire and PD as well as, likely, equipment and personnel from the airfield headed for the source of the black smoke that was staining the pristine fall sky...but it was a lost cause.   The crash scene was on a rock-strewn ridge well away from any roads, and it would have been a job getting a jeep anywhere vaguely near the crash scene, much less fire apparatus.  Several people...a combination of residents, fire and PD, and soldiers from the airfield...made the trek on foot and managed to get to the scene while the wreck was still burning.  According to reports I found, they tried to get to the passengers (So the fuselage may have still been partially intact when some of them got to it) but they couldn't even get near it. It would have been a lost cause anyway...as noted above, the plane's occupants were killed instantly. The DC-3 burned for about 5 hours without any application of water or foam.

The damaged bomber, meanwhile, made a routine landing and taxied to the hardstand. (Probably with one of the big army deuce and a half based crash trucks of that era following along, siren light mounted on it's left front fender winking at them).  Wilson shut down both engines, then he and Leicht climbed down onto the tarmac and, almost inevitably, walked around to the right side of the plane and gazed at the right engine.  An oil cooler air scoop was crushed, the rubber de-icer boot inboard of the engine was pulled partially loose and was hanging free, and the right prop was dinged and scratched, with a hunk missing from one blade. One of them may have walked around so he could look at the prop from the side...all of the blades looked like they may have been bent forward a bit as well.

Wilson sighed, looked at Leicht, and said something like 'I have a feeling that the skipper (The base commander) wants to talk to us.' The two of them trudged to the base commander's office to make the first official report of the incident. They had actually managed to come up with a story, BTW, one which they recounted to P.S.A.A.'s base commander. They had seen the DC-3, but then had flown into the smoke plume from a near-by forest fire and lost sight of it...it was while they were in this smoke plume that they hit the airliner.

Keep in mind here that the smoke column from a forest fire can be seen for as much as ten miles and often more, and that the airliner's crash scene was only three or so miles from the Army airfield. With that being said, I really hope that the base commander beckoned for them to follow him, walked outside, pointed at the pristine sky over San Gorgonio Pass (Stained by the black smoke column from the burning airliner, which was far darker and smaller than the high, wide wall of buff colored smoke generally generated by a brush or forest fire) and said 'What forest fire??'

Further questioning got the truth out of them, and three investigations began all but simultaneously as the DC-3's crash scene was put under military guard until both the U.S.Army and the C.A.B. investigators could examine it. The damaged bomber was immediately grounded, and very likely moved to a guarded hanger. Wilson was charged with 12 counts of manslaughter, among other charges, and brought before a military court marshal...and that's where things got just a bit strange. As in 'Suddenly Appearing Witness' strange.  But I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself here. Let's take a quick look-see at the C.A.B. investigation.

Investigators from the Civil Aeronautics Board (Or C.A.B., the fore runner to the F.A.A.) were on the scene with-in a day or so of the incident, and they likely split into teams, one team making the climb into the San Bernardino Mountains to the DC-3's crash site, another examining the damaged bomber (At least to the extent that the Army allowed them to.), and another interviewing any eyewitnesses to the collision.

Here's the thing...the C.A.B. investigators could only find two eyewitnesses who had actually seen the planes collide.  One was a house wife who had seen the collision from about three miles away, and another was a telephone company guard, who was also a volunteer plane spotter. The second witness was a bit closer, though his exact distance from the collision wasn't noted in the C.A.B. report,  Both, however, told the same story, the phone company guard/plane spotter with a good working knowledge of aircraft and aviation backing his statement.

They saw the bomber behind, to the left, and close in to the airliner, then saw the bomber turn to the right and clip the airliner's tail. They saw something fall away from the airliner, which then 'wobbled', fell away to the left and started turning slowly, falling almost straight down on an even keel until it disappeared behind obstructions that blocked it from view.  A couple of minutes later, they saw the black smoke beginning to rise.

Adding legitimacy to their version of events, it was essentially exactly what Wilson had told his superiors had happened. To pretty much put a lock on it, investigators found the upper 3/4s of the rudder and vertical stabilizer two miles from the DC-3's main wreckage site. Being comparatively light weight, flat, and aerodynamic in it's own right, it would be no stretch at all for the stabilizer to float, glide, and flutter that far when falling from an altitude of almost two miles. At any rate, the C.A.B. didn't have a difficult time at all coming up with a cause for this one.

They concluded that the accident was the result of  'The Reckless and Irresponsible act of the bomber pilot in maneuvering with-in close proximity of a civilian airliner for the sole purpose of signalling the airliner's co-pilot, and that the captain of the airliner was totally without fault.'

Thing is, the Army wasn't having any of that...they kinda pulled a fast one.

It's a couple of days into Lt Wilson's Court Marshal and, by his own testimony, he'd not only admitted that he did indeed put the bomber in extremely close proximity to the DC-3, he also told the court why he'd done so. Things were not looking good for Lt Wilson, and it pretty much looked like the prosecution had a lock on it...

Then the defense calls the third eye witness...

All of the C.A.B. investigators at the trial probably silently asked 'Wait...what...Where the hell did this guy come from???' as one person. They only knew of two eyewitnesses. But sure 'nuff, there was an Army private, in his dress uniform, being sworn in and told to take the stand...

Meet Private Roy West, U.S.Army, who apparently made himself available to the Army investigators (Or maybe Bob Wilson's defense team) when he heard they were searching out eye witnesses.

Private West, in his testimony, stated that he had been batting a tennis ball off of the side of a building at the U.S.C. Campus (I'm thinking he actually meant California State) and was about three miles from the aircraft when he spotted the two planes (If it was Cal State-San Bernardino, it was more like five or six miles) and he took notice of them because they were flying in such close proximity.

Ok, keep in mind here that he was looking at two airplanes, each about 50 or 60 feet long, from below and as much as six miles distant, and that he was not at all familiar with aviation...he'd flown in an airplane. Twice. As a passenger. From three miles an object that's sixty feet long appears about as long as an adult's fingernail, so this leads me to ask just how much detail someone who was familiar with airplanes could make out from that distance, much less someone who wasn't.

As he was watching, he continued, the airliner, seeking a lower altitude, dropped it's nose and raised it's tail, colliding with the bomber.  And yes, you read that right. He basically said that Captain Pedley flew his aircraft into the bomber, not the other way around.

OK, let's take a real quick look at the way an airplane maneuvers along that 'Pitch' axis. When you push forward on the stuck, the elevators swing down and this causes the nose to drop and the aircraft to descend. It does not, however, rotate the aircraft around the pitch Axis as if it's on a axle or balanced on a fulcrum...Or to put it in simpler terms, the nose doesn't drop, say, ten feet causing the tail to also rise by ten feet, It just don't work that way.

We won't go into the fact that, even if it did work that way, it would still mean that Wilson had to be only ten or twelve feet above the airliner's tail in order to get hit in the first place. Unless you are part of an aerobatics team called The Blue Angels or The Thunderbirds, you do not intentionally fly that close to another airplane.

Trust me on this, as Private West described what he supposedly saw, The C.A.B. investigators were looking at him incredulously. Anyone who knew anything about airplanes was looking at him incredulously. I have a feeling any 8 year old airplane buffs who happened upon a news article about Private West's testimony would have looked at it incredulously.

The Military court trying Lt Wilson, however found it absolutely believable...so believable, in fact, that they acquitted Wilson of all charges and returned him to his unit. Cue more looks of incredulity (And one look of intense relief from one Lt Bill Wilson.).

This didn't keep the C.A.B. from burning him a new one in their conclusion at the end of their official report on the crash, but those conclusions didn't have any effect on Lt. Wilson's career. His acquittal basically allowed him the get away with negligently causing the deaths of 12 people without suffering any consequences at all. He was likely transferred to another unit nowhere near California shortly there-after and he dropped from sight shortly after that, and I'm talking no info, other than that related to the mid-air, at all, anywhere.  I couldn't even find out whether he survived the war or not.

As to how he managed to escape being found guilty and sentenced...we can thank the the mysterious Private Roy West who, were I a cynical individual, I'd say was very likely coached on what to say, possibly even with the promise of some kind of remuneration when the trial was over.

As to why the Army would do something like this...I can't even begin to figure this one out, though the desire to avoid bad publicity comes immediately to mind. Also, it was war-time, and the desire to avoid the loss of a trained pilot could have well factored into it as well.

 Another possibility could have been the number of complaints that the airlines had made about Army aircraft flying to close to airliners since the war began. There had been several near misses...one so close that the airline pilot's evasive action had actually thrown a couple of passengers from their seats...and this midair was one big  'I Told You So', with consequences yet to be seen...unless their pilot ended up being acquitted of all charges.

Wilson's motivations for pulling such a dangerous stunt are a little easier to figure out. All of these thousands of young men training to be military pilots were highly patriotic, highly motivated, and full of what my grandfather and father both would have termed 'Piss and Vinegar'.

First, as military pilots, a lot of these guys considered themselves just a little bit more skilled than the average civilian pilot. They wanted action, preferably against aircraft with either black crosses or red 'Rising Suns' painted on their sides. And, as noted above, all of them wanted fighters...that was the glamour job, throwing a P-47, or P-51, or P-38 or Grumman Wildcat or Vought Corsair around the sky, blowing away any enemy aircraft that had the misfortune of getting anywhere near them.

Of courses not everyone could be in fighters, and not everyone could always be in a war zone. So those pilots occasionally made their own action happen. And when they did, that action occasionally became an accident that often ended up having tragic consequences.

I think that's exactly what happened to Lt. Wilson...he wanted to make his own action, as innocent as it seemed...to him. He'd been trained to fly this type of aircraft, therefore he knew what he was doing. Just how dangerous could flying a few hundred feet from a larger, slower aircraft that he could fly circles around be, anyway?

Sadly, he found out, and the answer was not the one he expected.

 In his mind (And the minds of thousands of young pilots) the rules and regulations were merely guidelines that could be modified on the fly in order to get the job done...and yes, that's how a lot of personnel looked at it. In  a combat zone, when the formation of bombers a pilot is escorting is suddenly jumped by a couple of dozen Me109s or FW190s, or Mitsubishi Zeros there was actually more than a little truth to that thought.

Problem was, this wasn't a combat zone...it was Southern California in a very tight traffic corridor, and there wasn't a plane with a black cross or a red circle on it's side with-in several thousand miles.

Also, Wilson wasn't that experienced with handling the type of aircraft he was flying...he only had 18 hours in the B-34, only half of that in the left seat, so he wasn't fully familiar with how it would react in given situations at given power settings and control surface configurations. And he wasn't entirely familiar with all of it's blind spots.

I'm not talking about the huge blind spot ahead of and below the aircraft...the only time that might be a legitimate issue is on landing approach in a congested traffic pattern, and only then if another pilot is somewhere he shouldn't be. In normal level flight at cruise altitude, however, no pilot should ever be close enough to another airplane for it to be hidden in that 'Underneath and In Front' blind spot.

There are other blind spots, however, When Wilson came up on a parallel course with and a mile and a half or more to the left of the DC-3, he was still well with-in regulations, which I believe called for a separation distance of 500 feet. He was also over-taking and passing (Though he possibly throttled back when he 'wing-wagged'). He started living loose with the rules when he crossed over in front of the airliner and throttled back to allow it to over take him, both because of the maneuver itself, and because he couldn't see where it was in relation to his own position, but he lucked out that time as he still had a quarter mile or so separation from the airliner.

He totally screwed the pooch, though, when he decided that they still weren't close enough. He put the bomber into a left turn,  gaining a bit more altitude, and probably pulling ahead of the airliner slightly as he did so (If he'd dropped back, he wouldn't have hit it in the second turn, to the right), then slo-o-o-ly loosing that slight lead as he turned. In the process of making that left turn he lost sight of the DC-3 because it was first slightly behind and below him, then as he turned, to his left and below him, (Probably hidden beneath the wing and engine nacelle) and finally (And absolutely unknown to him) just ahead of him and below him, and to his right. Completely inside that evil 'Ahead And Below' blind spot.

 Wilson didn't even try to keep the airliner in sight as he turned. and, by not keeping it in sight through-out the closing maneuver, which turned into an inadvertent crossing maneuver, he lost any semblance of situational awareness. He had absolutely no idea where the DC-3 was in relation to his own aircraft at any time during that left turn. I mean think about it...when he rolled out of the turn he thought he was still to the right of the airliner instead of slightly to the left...and when he finally tried to do something sensible and turn away from it...to the right...he turned into it.

But again, if he hadn't approached the airliner so closely in the first place, none of the above would have been a factor. But unfortunately he did, it was, and twelve people died because of it.

Then the Army let him get by with it. I couldn't find any reports of the reaction to that...and it was a far different era, keep in mind...but I can only imagine that the families of those twelve people weren't real happy about it, not that they had a lot of recourse. From the sounds of things, the Army pretty much wrote their own ending to the story, then swept it under the oft-mentioned rug, and they were likely the only ones happy with the way things turned out.

The story doesn't quite end yet, though...and it's post script was written by Lockheed B-34 Bureau # 41-38116, the very same bomber involved in the mid-air.. After the investigation was over, the B-34 was quickly repaired and put back in service. (Even as the crew repairing it were likely amazed at the concept of a plane that was involved in a mid-air collision suffering only minor, quickly repairable damage). One thing we don't know, BTW, is if those repairs included installation of a new right engine.

After it was repaired, 41-38116 was re-designated as an RB-34A-4 target tug, used to tow large cloth banners that were used by fighter jocks for gunnery practice. The bomber didn't serve in that role for long though. It was sent to the East Coast, and on August 5th, 1943...less than a year after the Palm Springs mid-air...it was being ferried from one base to another when it lost an engine near Smithfield, Rhode Island. I don't know if the pilot tried to turn into the dead engine, stalled, and spun in, or if it was loaded to a weight that was too heavy for a single engine to keep it in the air, but what ever the cause the bomber crashed into into Wolf Hill, near Smithfield, killing all three crew members. Oh...from what little I could find out, it was the right engine that failed...the same engine that was damaged in the mid air collision.

<***> Notes, Links, & Stuff <***>

 Ahhh, the difference something like, say, an C.A.B report makes! While there was very little information  available about this one on-line, the C.A.B. report was on-line, and it made a huge difference. Both of the other sources that actually said anything about how the accident happened basically stated that the B-34 clipped the DC-3's tail after flying recklessly close to it without any further details.  The C.A.B report, on the other hand, was very detailed and in-depth, both concerning the details of the accident, and the details of Lt Wilson's Courts Marshal. While reading it, I could almost read  'Where the hell did he come from?!?', referring to the mysterious Private West, between the lines.

Between the unbelievably reckless actions that caused the accident, and the sudden appearance of Private West, this was definitely a one of a kind accident, and the report being available allowed me to write a post that...I hope, at any rate...did it justice.

This one's been all but forgotten, save for some die-hard aviation buffs and aviation archeologists, but it's still important in the context of history and regulations. Accidents like this, as stupid as they were (Or maybe because they were as stupid as they were) helped develop the rules, regulations, and procedures that make air travel the safest form of modern transportation.

On to the Notes!

<***>

The flight number wasn't retired after the crash, and in fact is still in use today.  Today's Flight 28 is still a coast-to-coast flight originating in L.A. (LAX rather than Burbank now) and ending in New York (JFK), but these days it's a non-stop red-eye, departing from LAX at around 10 PM, and landing at JFK at around 6:00 AM (3:00 AM L.A. Time)

<***>

While there weren't but a couple of mid-airs involving military aircraft and airliners in U.S. airspace during the war years, there were thousands of crashes involving military aircraft. Over 14,000 aircraft were lost in the U.S. between December 1941 and September 1945, resulting in just under 15,000 fatalities to military personnel.

I can just about bet that the number of young kids being put in the cockpits of high performance aircraft had something to do with a goodly number of these crashes, but the thing is, there is no other way to train combat pilots during a war. They have to be turned loose quickly, and many of them hadn't worked all of that excess 'Piss and Vinegar' out of their systems when they were awarded their wings. This created the same basic effect you get when you give a teenager a high performance car for their 16th birthday. Both the teenager and the young pilot with newly minted wings are going to be sorely tempted to see how far they can push the limits of their new rides.

The result was a lot of planes augering in before their pilots ever shipped out to a war zone over the course of the three and three quarters years we were involved in the war.

<***>

Air Transport Command...the command that Bill Wilson was attached to...ferried some 270,000 aircraft from point 'A' to point 'B' worldwide over the course of the war, losing only 1,013 in the process. One of these, of course, was B-34 BuNo 41-38116, when she augered in in her second accident.

<***>

 If you can find the DC-3's crash site, you'd still find remnants of the plane scattered about, as well as a monument to those who died in the crash (I also posted a link, below, to some pictures of the monument and the remaining wreckage). The plane burned for five hours, so most of it was reduced to melted aluminum slag, and the larger parts of the plane that remained...the tail and wings...were probably melted down on site and removed to be recycled for the war effort.

<***>

Interestingly, all four airfields mentioned in this post are still very active airports. Long Beach Army Airfield is now Long Beach International Airport. Lockheed Air Terminal is now Bob Hope Airport/Hollywood-Burbank airport, March Field is now a California Air National Guard base as well as home to a truly kick-ass aviation museum, and Palm Springs Army Airfield is now Palm Springs International Airport.

Needless to say, all have been expanded and modernized greatly over the years, and Bob Hope Airport as well as Palm Springs airport have erased all hints of their earlier days as, respectively, one of L.A.'s first major airports and a bustling Army air base. If, however, you go to Google Earth and look at both March Field and Long Beach Airport and look closely you can see definite remnants of their earlier years...especially at March Field, where one entire runway from the past still exists as well as remnants of a second.

<***> Links <***>

Not a whole lot available on-line about this one, but I included the best three I found, plus one other interesting general info site..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_28  The all but inevitable Wiki page. Includes links to the C.A.B report (First link in References) as well as several period news articles.

http://ghosttownexplorers.org/aircraft/flight28/01.htm   Page from Ghost Town Explorers about the crash, includes pics of what remains at the DC-3's crash site today. This is an awesome site in general...just don't start exploring it if you're pressed for time, because it'll eat up a couple of hours without even breaking a sweat!

http://smithapplebyhouse.org/prelude/  Another excellent blog post about the accident.

https://www.quora.com/Why-were-there-so-many-accidental-air-crashes-by-U-S-planes-in-WWII
An interesting discussion about the high number of military aircraft crashes in the U.S during WW II