NEW YORK: Hot Night in the City

It was a still, hot, muggy Saturday night in New York, the kind of night that drives families out of their apartment houses and homes into the streets and parks, onto their tenement fire escapes, and into their autos for long, aimless cruises along the webwork of the city's highways—the kind of sense-dulling night that makes people hope for something to happen to take their minds off the weather's oppression.

Then, something happened. From the radio came tense bulletins: Flight 102—Pan American's London-bound Boeing 707 jet—taking off at 8:37 from Long Island's Idlewild Airport, had lost two wheels from its four-wheeled...