Transport: Stratoliner's Crash

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The residents of the little village of Alder, Wash, heard the sedate rumble of her four 1,100 h.p. engines change to a snarling roar as her pilot put her nose downhill through the overcast one day last week. From the clouds 10,000 feet above them she burst into view, fleet, round-bodied. A black speck burst from her left side, grew with incredible rapidity as it hurtled to the ground—an engine. Her sleek left wing swung back, twisted in the air and fell away as her engines alternately roared and growled.

Boeing's 33-passenger Stratoliner, pressurized to travel above the airways at 20,000 feet, was in her death throes, had broken up in an engineering test dive. Down the crippled ship came, spinning, straightening out, sailing like a piece of ragged paper, carrying the ten men in her to sure death.

She crashed in a wooded ravine. From the flattened fuselage, stretched out like a beached and broken whale not far from where her wing and engine lay, workmen took the bodies of three Boeing pilots, the chief test pilot of Transcontinental & Western Air, four Boeing office and shop employes and two Hollanders who had been thinking of buying Stratoliners for Dutch airlines.

At the Boeing plant, some 50 miles to the north in Seattle, work was stopped on ten other Stratoliners, three of which have been ordered by Pan American airways. Perplexed, President C. L. Egtvedt of Boeing declared: "It was . . . one of the best we have built. I can't believe the fault lay in the ship itself." Quick to deny that this implied sabotage was Boeing. But the facts remained that the first Stratoliner, carefully built and tested on the ground, had flown about 23 hours in closely supervised engineering tests without sign of structural weakness, that into her building had gone all the genius that had produced the Army's successful flying fortresses, Pan Am's 74-passenger flying boats.