Locked Controls

DISASTERS Locked Controls Rudders, ailerons and elevators of grounded aircraft will flap in the wind unless they are kept rigidly locked. Until planes got too big, it was easy enough to walk around outside one after a landing and slip wooden battens over the control surfaces—and to take them off before taxiing out to the runway. But the wings and tails of many modern transports cannot be reached from the ground; rudders present so much surface to a cross wind, moreover, that pilots often find it necessary to keep them locked while taxiing. release them just before a takeoff. Most big planes, as a result, now have built-in locking systems operated from the cockpit.

To lock all controls on the Air Force's enormous double-decked troop-carrying C124 Globemasters, pilots have to pull up a knob on the throttle pedestal. To release them before a takeoff, it is necessary to push the knob down past four notches: the throttles are freed at the first notch, the ailerons are unlocked at the second.

the rudder at the third, the elevators at the fourth. Last week, searching through the wreckage of the Globemaster at Moses Lake, Wash., in which 87 servicemen died (TIME, Dec. 29), investigators found its locking panel—and the plain cause of the crash. The knob hadn't been pushed past the second notch.

It was only possible to conclude that the crash was the result of tragic negligence on the part of the pilot. He had gone down the runway with rudder and elevators still locked up. The plane took off. and went into a steep climb. In the minute after it was airborne, probably the pilot tried to get the nose down, found to his horror that the controls were rigid, perhaps even grabbed for the knob at his right knee. But by then the Globemaster had stalled, had crashed and was being hammered into blazing wreckage on the hard desert floor.