DISASTER: Death in the Blue Ridge

In a thunderstorm which delayed it for nearly half an hour at Washington's airport, a Douglas DC-3 of Pennsylvania Central Airlines took off one night last week for Pittsburgh. Twenty-three minutes later, over the foothills of the Blue Ridge range near Lovettsville, Va., 36 miles west of Washington, something happened. Farmers attracted by a crash found the plane strewn over a clearing into which it had apparently plunged full tilt. Killed and mangled were all 21 passengers, its crew of four. The force of the crash was so great that, strapped in their seats, many of them were literally cut in two by their safety belts.

The news of the worst crash in the history of U. S. aviation ended 17 months of safe operation. It stunned Washington. It had political repercussions: because among the dead was Minnesota's 62-year-old Farmer-Labor Senator Ernest Lundeen, whose successor will be named by Republican Governor Stassen; because after the crash in 1935 which killed Senator Bronson Cutting of New Mexico, Senator Lundeen voted to establish the independent Civil Aeronautics Authority (for air safety, development and regulation), and CAA was recently transferred to the Commerce Department. The crash also was a direct blow to several Government bureaus: aboard the ship, as it happened, were able younger employes of Internal Revenue, FBI, ICC.