The Nation: Fatal Sequence

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Nineteen months had passed without a single fatal crash of a scheduled airliner in the U.S., a safety record unprecedented in commercial aviation. But last week, in the inexplicable pattern that seems to govern such disasters, two airliners went down, one on each coast, killing a total of 78 persons. Twenty-eight of them died when an Allegheny Airlines twin jet crashed in a swamp near Connecticut's Tweed-New Haven Airport. Another 50 were killed in the collision of a Hughes Air West DC-9 and a Navy F-4 Phantom jet over California's San Gabriel Mountains.

Both crashes raised ominous and specific questions. Two years ago, the Air Line Pilots Association called Tweed-New Haven Airport one of the nation's ten most dangerous, and last week the airport manager said that the crash would not have occurred if the airport had been equipped with an instrument-landing system. In California, some witnesses said that the Phantom, from the El Toro Marine Air Station, had been making barrel rolls—stunt flying—before it collided with the airliner, which was on its correct path from Los Angeles International Airport. It remains for the sole survivor, a Marine radar officer who bailed out, to explain what a military plane was doing making barrel rolls near one of the world's busiest airports.