Swamp Landing

As darkness fell, the frogs began their insistent chorus. Over the black waters rustled the murmurous night noises of the Florida swamp where the big Eastern Airliner lay. She lay sprawled just as she had slewed into the water at 9 o'clock that morning, her big engines jerked from their mounts and dropped near her left wing tip in the mud. Inside her cabin, water was knee-deep, but the lights still burned. Huddled on the seats were 13 passengers, two pilots, a steward.

Nobody had been killed but everyone had been hurt. Shaken but lucid, 76-year-old Dr. George Crile, famed Cleveland surgeon, was pinned in his seat, but gave advice to his fellow townsman, Dr. Daniel P. Quiring, in first-aid work. Except for Captain Gerald O'Brien, the first pilot, who was out of his head, everybody was quietly hopeful of help, for before dark a circling plane had sighted the DC-3, whipped back to Vero Beach, ten miles away, for help. Captain O'Brien was still flying the plane through that morning's murderous thunderstorm. "Come on, Mac," he mumbled, "help me pull this wheel—we've got to get altitude." His copilot, B. M. Crabtree, had a broken leg. He sat cheerfully and waited.

Towards midnight, a flare burst from a circling airplane, bathed the marsh in man-made moonlight. Boats pushed out from the rushes, pulled alongside the plane's door. Rescuers began removing the passengers. Dr. Crile had begun to wander a bit. "I am Dr. George Crile," he said. "I want a warm bath." Captain O'Brien was unconscious.

So ended, happily enough in the circumstances, the seventh crash on U.S. airlines since last August, the second on Eastern Air Lines in 36 days. (While the ship was missing, the line's president, Eddie Rickenbacker, injured in the first E.A.L. accident, listened from his hospital bed at Atlanta to the radio reports on the search.) That morning, up from Miami, Pilot O'Brien had made a routine stop at West Palm Beach, had headed northwest toward Daytona Beach, knowing he would have to pass through a belt of thunderstorms lying across Florida's width.

Pilots give thunderstorms a wide berth if possible, for within their cores often lies turbulence in which no airplane can live. A half-hour after he had left Palm Beach, Pilot O'Brien was in the thunderstorm belt: the ship was snapped up into the most violent flying some of his veteran passengers had ever seen. Why he landed when he did is still a subject for investigation, which CAB started immediately. Meanwhile, Co-Pilot Crabtree quoted Captain O'Brien as saying that one of the aileron controls had snapped in the storm. If that should be found true, Trip 14's passengers and crew were lucky to be alive.