Transport: Muddling

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What three British flying officers—Group Captain George C. Pirie, Aviation Attaché at the Washington Embassy, a Royal Air Force officer and a Canadian aircraft inspector—learned last week about. the crash of Imperial Airways' Bermuda-bound flying boat they kept to themselves. The Cavalier itself lay peacefully not far from the scandal-smeared hull of the steamer, Vestris (1928), 300 miles from where the Mono Castle burned (1934). But it was no secret that the Cavalier, like these ill-fated steamships, had been caught in circumstances for which it was unprepared and had muddled through pretty sloppily.

Imperial's muddle No. 1: its failure to provide the Cavalier'S, engines with the sure-fire exhaust heaters used with U. S. airline carburetors for the past ten years.

Muddle No. 2: the complacency with which the ship's crew plowed on deeper into icing weather after they knew they were in trouble. Forty-nine minutes before she crashed, the Cavalier radioed that she might have to take the desperate expedient of landing in the open sea; 15 minutes before the landing she sent out an SOS. Yet she continued Bermuda-ward, made no effort to locate seagoing vessels near which she might land for quick rescue.

Muddle No. 3: Captain Marmaduke R. Alderson had lost three engines and the fourth was wheezing for lack of fuel when he finally landed, virtually dead-stick. With no power to smooth out her landing the Cavalier struck heavily on the crest of a mountainous wave, bashed in her hull.

Muddle No. 4: With 49 minutes warning of a landing, the stewards failed to get all the passengers belted in their seats. Result: one man was thrown violently. Severely injured, he was supported by others until he died and was given to the sea.

Muddle No. 5: While Pan American Airways, which operates the Bermuda run jointly with Imperial, carries four rocket-equipped life rafts on its Bermuda Clipper (total raft capacity: 40 persons), the Cavalier had none. When she began to sink, her eight passengers, her five crew members had to take to the water, hanging to six or seven buoyant seat packs, which had not been issued until after the ship struck. One man passenger, unable to swim, was struck by wreckage as he left the ship, and drowned. A steward, held in the terrified ring where the survivors hung around their seat cushions, finally lost his hold and was drowned.

When indignant members of Congress trumpeted for application of U. S. airworthiness rules to Imperial's aircraft, the hand-tied U. S. Civil Aeronautics Authority replied that it was bound by a reciprocal agreement for the New York-Bermuda route to accept Britain's requirements for Imperial's planes, just as England accepts CAA provisions for Pan American.