Transport: Cavalier Crash

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That Britain's airlines have not yet whipped the engine-strangling menace of carburetor ice (U. S. lines licked it in 1929 by heaters from the exhaust), was tragically demonstrated one afternoon last week. Less than two hours after Imperial Airways' four-motored flying boat Cavalier had left New York for Bermuda with eight passengers, a five-man crew, a series of terse, desperate messages began to reach the Port Washington base.

Over a windswept sea 322 miles southeast of Cape May, Cavalier suddenly radioed: "All engines failing—ice. . . . SOS . . . Landed okay . . . sinking."

Two men passengers and a steward were lost during the ten hours that the survivors, five of them women, clung precariously to seat-pack life preservers. Toward midnight, the Standard Oil tanker Esso Baytown, one of many craft searching by sea and air, picked them up, took them to New York.

Tight-lipped Imperial officials refused to tell reporters whether the Cavalier's, engines had carburetor heaters. Little better off than newsmen was the U. S. Civil Aeronautics Authority, which didn't know either. Under a reciprocal agreement, Imperial's planes are checked for airworthiness by Britain's Air Ministry at Bermuda. Pan American Airways planes, which ply the same route, are checked by CAA inspectors at Port Washington.