Fireball

by Robert Matzen

  The regional signal beacons used as aerial navigation aids were given tremendous scrutiny. Because of the danger of air attack by the Japanese, only signal beacons that could be extinguished on 15-minutes’ notice were allowed to be lit that night, which meant that the beacon on difficult-to-access Potosi Mountain and the one near Goodsprings both had been left dark. The Potosi beacon, 23B, located near the crash scene, would have alerted Williams and Gillette to the dangers they faced. The Goodsprings beacon, 23A, would have helped as well, signaling to Williams that the mountains to his right had been safely passed. But then, the lights of houses in Goodsprings should have done that, so why did Williams choose to fly a course to the north and west of Goodsprings, bisecting Highway 91, flying to the north of the Arden beacon and thus clearly the wrong way, and straight toward Potosi Mountain? The other pilots estimated that Williams was 7 miles off course in only 15 minutes of flight time when he hit the mountain, an unheard of discrepancy for a veteran pilot.

  Capt. DeVries indicated that his practice had been to gain altitude out of Vegas as quickly as possible while flying toward beacon 23A. This way he knew he had flown safely past Potosi. But beacon 24 in Arden was the only beacon lit, leading an investigator to ask, “I am wondering now, if, in your judgment, guiding first to 24 and then going straight on looking for another beacon might have caused him to fly into this mountain.”

  “Had he done so it undoubtedly would have had something to do with it,” said DeVries.

  “Do you think he did?” asked the investigator.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” DeVries shrugged, and when pressed to speculate on the action of Capt. Williams said it was impossible to reconstruct accurately, because, “I don’t believe you will find two pilots anywhere who conduct a flight exactly the same.”

  TWA Captain Alexis Klotz, who had flown into and out of Las Vegas for 14 years, described his procedure for departing Las Vegas to the south on a night run: “I always have the [cockpit] lights turned down as low as possible, and I always fly for the farthest light I can see…, beacon 24 on the ridge just this side of Goodsprings, and just north of where the accident happened; but by the time you get over the city of Las Vegas you are able to pick up beacon 23A, which is Table Mountain. But I flew that run before we had any beacon lights, and I used to use the town of Arden on the left and the town of Goodsprings. You can always see those lights. As long as you can see those lights that is all you have to get.”

  Amber Airway Number 2, one of the highways in the sky used by TWA pilots, came into question. TWA regulations did not mandate a particular altitude for its planes. Regulations stated only that a pilot must remain 1,000 feet above terrain. A Congressman asked Capt. Klotz if he would consider 8,000 feet of altitude out of Las Vegas to be within regulations for Amber Airway No. 2. “I certainly would,” said Klotz. Asked to explain, considering that Flight 3 hit terrain on Amber Airway No. 2 but lower than 8,000 feet, Klotz said, “It is very true that you can wander off just a little bit and hit something, and that is what happened. But, as I explained to the other Congressman this morning, we drive down a narrow highway. There is traffic within 12 inches on one side and a gully on the other. It is considered safe. You watch what you are doing.”

  Transcripts of radio conversations between Air Traffic Control and the plane were routine. No maydays had been issued; just an all clear from Las Vegas along with the departure time.

  The weight of the plane at takeoff from Albuquerque, and from Las Vegas, was scrutinized and Ed Knudsen, who had adjusted the numbers to allow for takeoff from Albuquerque, was called to explain his actions. Chuck Duffy of Las Vegas also testified. The plane was clearly overweight in terms of passengers, baggage, mail, and other cargo. In particular, the 15 Army personnel each carried with them full, heavy gear in terms of flight kits, parachutes, tools, and other material.

  While the Wright Cyclone G202 engines had plenty of power for a load slightly over maximum, TWA Capt. DeVries testified before the House Committee that a heavy load would have affected the rate of climb out of Las Vegas. DeVries had flown into and out of Vegas and knew the capabilities of the DC-2s and DC-3s in the TWA fleet. Of the lift capabilities of Williams and Flight 3, DeVries stated: “The rate of climb varies greatly depending upon the load, the air condition, and many other variables that are possible. He could have 8,000 feet within 32 miles under certain conditions, but it is more likely that he would have less with a heavily loaded ship.” Flight 3 struck the mountain 33 miles from the airport at approximately 7,700 feet.

  Temperature was investigated as a possible factor. Did the engines struggle to meet the pilot’s climb rate? Said Capt. DeVries, “If he is climbing the total distance sometimes due to atmospheric conditions—i.e., heat or cold—if the motors are running hot or there is a tendency for them to overheat it will climb more slowly and keep a higher airspeed to get the cooling effect on the motors….”

  Several witnesses were asked about evidence of sabotage. All said there was no such evidence, although the plane had been so mangled and the on-scene investigation so cursory that evidence not obliterated by the crash may have been overlooked. The priority had been to locate and remove the dead movie star and her party so that Clark Gable could return to Hollywood. Yes, the area was secured from looting, but the investigation was by no means forensic in nature. In fact, the last TWA man to leave the scene on Tuesday, January 20, Waldon Golien, reported that he was still retrieving body parts and personal effects up to the last moment and that searchers could continue to do so indefinitely. With so much potential evidence still up there, who was to say if the plane had or had not been tampered with?

  What about the soldier that Ed Fuqua, the TWA maintenance man in Las Vegas, mentioned in his testimony? Fuqua was asked, “At the time that you were working about the airplane and servicing it, did you observe anyone loitering around the airplane that had no right to be there?”

  “No, I didn’t,” he replied. “I don’t think there was anybody but a guard up in front where I was but I couldn’t tell, I was so busy. I didn’t even think to look around.”

  “Was the sentry a soldier?” he was asked.

  “Yes, because I remember checking his [the aircraft’s] tanks twice and I think I almost bumped into the soldier once, or something. I know there was a soldier there.”

  Why was the soldier, who was never called as a witness, standing so close to the plane that the mechanic almost bumped into him? Is it possible that something was done to the aircraft to limit its controllability after takeoff? Calvin Harper had heard what he described as “irregularity of one of the motors.” When asked to elaborate, the eyewitness told investigators, “One of the motors sounded perfectly normal, while the other motor sounded just as an automobile motor sounds at times when you have carburetor trouble—when the power goes on a bit and off a bit. In other words, I heard that motor for a minute, and then I couldn’t hear it, and then it would come on again.” Harper had ridden in airplanes “25 or 30 times” and loved to tinker with car engines in his spare time.

  Willard George at the Wilson Ranch stated that “it just sounded as though the engines were racing at top speed. They were roaring.”

  The nation was gripped by sadness at the death of Carole Lombard in a plane disaster, and yet the nation moved on, so Lombard’s value as a target of sabotage was limited. But those 15 Army Air Corps fliers played a more significant role in the war effort, ferrying brand-new bombers for immediate use against Axis targets.

  Nazi spy networks were known to exist only in the northeastern United States and based in and around New York City. In fact, the 80,000-ton French passenger ship Normandie, in the midst of being converted to a U.S. troop ship, was destroyed by a mysterious fire while docked at the port of New York just 24 days after Flight 3 crashed. The Normandie had been sabotaged by German operatives, and Congress, the newspapers, and the American people knew it. Yet the cause was engineered by investigators into an “accident” and not
sabotage. So close to Pearl Harbor, the White House would not admit that a giant ship had been destroyed by the enemy on the U.S. mainland. Similarly, if Flight 3 had crashed because of sabotage, this fact would have been covered up beginning that Friday night when Burbank told Duffy the situation was “under control.” Such a cover up would have been practical: The United States didn’t possess resources enough to provide maximum security to every civilian flight from every airport at all hours of the day and night for the duration of the war. Such extreme measures would have crippled American commerce. Business travelers, including those in government service, would be confined to trains; air mail would cease to be viable. Troops would be diverted from the European and Pacific theaters of war to guard the civilian air fleet.

  Accompanying the first team to reach the crash site, the FBI had examined the skin, guts, engines, propellers, and cargo of Flight 3. They went over debris on the mountain, and then investigated the mechanics who had serviced the flight along with the engineering logs, flight crews, and passengers who had died on board or hopped off at various stops.

  Calvin Harper’s testimony about the flame trailing one engine drew interest from the FBI, as did Jack Moore’s statement that upon reaching the crash scene, he saw that “the passengers had been literally thrown through the side of the cabin, which had practically disintegrated after the crash.” Moore described “parts of bodies, mail, luggage, and parts of the plane scattered over a wide area.” The FBI wanted to know, did sabotage cause the complete destruction of Flight 3?

  An FBI report from the beginning of February mentioned a communist informant who fingered Joseph Szigeti as the saboteur: “He probably left something on the plane, probably a violin case which contained something which affected the plane’s instruments.”

  Charlie Hawley, the camper collecting firewood who watched Flight 3 pass directly overhead and at low altitude reported seeing the plane turning slightly to the left, left, left. Were Williams and Gillette attempting to turn away from the mountain, but with limited maneuverability? If this were the case, it raises the question, did the flight crew and passengers know what was about to happen to them? Did they have warning that amounted to minutes and not a mere second or two? And if so, how terrifying were those last moments?

  Virtuoso violinist Joseph Szigeti then became the focus of the FBI’s investigation. He had first traveled to and performed in the United States in 1925 and had toured all over the world, from his native Hungary to Moscow to South America and all points in between. He was a colleague of the top classical musicians in the world, had performed with Maestros Richard Strauss, Igor Stravinsky, and Eugene Ormandy, among many others, and seemed to live and breathe not murder, but music, all hours of the day and night. He had refused to perform in Germany from 1933 on and had settled with his wife and family in southern California, where he hoped to return aboard Flight 3 before being bumped in Albuquerque. That turn of fortune caused Szigeti to receive the only known message of congratulation about Flight 3, a telegram from Polish conductor Artur Rodzinski celebrating what he called Szigeti’s “rebirthday.” Szigeti had to agree that “indeed it was.”

  Not just the Communist informant but many other citizens wrote to authorities certain that the passenger with the foreign-sounding name, Joseph Szigeti, had brought down the DC-3. One even connected the musician to the loss of Pennsylvania Central Airlines Trip 19 on August 31, 1940 and claimed Szigeti had placed something on board the DC-3 at National Airport that had caused a crash killing 25, including U.S. Senator Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota. This was the crash that Warren Carey of the CAB had attributed to lightning.

  Szigeti himself stated that he should have been aboard Trip 19 when it crashed in Virginia, but stated that he “had a lot of letters to get off,” so he missed the flight. It remains an improbable coincidence that Szigeti was connected with the only two fatal DC-3 crashes of this time period, both of which resulted in the deaths of prominent Americans on federal government business. Yet the FBI could not connect Szigeti with any sinister actions that might have resulted in either disaster.

  Not found in surviving FBI information was any mention of Ernest Pretsch, the 29-year-old, German-born TWA pilot who had lived in his native country to age 14 and captained Flight 3 from Kansas City to Albuquerque. Pretsch would maintain close ties with his homeland and after the war head up a TWA-Lufthansa joint venture, but he seems never to have been an object of scrutiny by the FBI.

  A bizarre twist would be added 72 years later, in 2013, when the book, My Lunches with Orson would revisit the thought that Flight 3 had been brought down by the Nazis. In transcripts of lunches between Orson Welles and film director Henry Jaglom, Welles asserted that Lombard’s plane had been shot down by Nazi agents “standing on the ridge” who “knew the exact route that the plane had to take.” However, such agents would have had to possess this knowledge with several hours of head start to climb the mountain, which they didn’t have since the stop in Las Vegas had been necessitated only by darkness falling on Boulder City. However, one statement by Welles—a friend of FDR—can still produce chills: “The people who know it, know it. It was greatly hushed up. The official story was that it ran into the mountain.”

  In the end, after following all leads involving Szigeti, examining the wreckage, and looking at the remoteness of Las Vegas and the fact that Flight 3 took off from a U.S. Army facility that appeared secure, the FBI failed to pull together enough threads to make a case for sabotage, and the Committee agreed that sabotage seemed unlikely.

  Official scrutiny returned to Williams and Gillette when it was stated that Wayne Williams had been assigned to this region—from Albuquerque on west—just two months prior to the crash and had made several trips into and out of Las Vegas, but only one night trip from Las Vegas to Burbank. In addition, Wayne had lost flight time in his new region due to hospitalization related to the removal of his tonsils.

  Gillette was shown to be as new to this district as was Williams and had flown out of Las Vegas only twice, once toward Burbank at night. Gillette’s flight plan was found in Albuquerque and on it, he had recorded the compass heading and altitude for the intended departure from Las Vegas. But these numbers were incorrect for Las Vegas; he had jotted down the heading and altitude for a departure from Boulder City. For a departure from Las Vegas, this heading took the plane directly into Potosi Mountain at an altitude approaching 8,000, which was too low to clear it.

  Williams became a victim of renewed character assassination in the press. Rumors circulated that he left the cockpit to visit with Carole Lombard, and yet Flight 3 was the only ship in the sky at that time and all witnesses were deceased, reducing this claim to pure fantasy since no one could have witnessed him leaving the pilot’s seat—an unlikely eventuality in any case given the procedures involved with takeoff and climb to altitude in the first minutes of flight.

  The final word was given to James N. Peyton, Investigator in Charge of the Safety Bureau, Civil Aeronautics Board Region 2, who visited the crash site from January 24–26 and made the following statement that greatly influenced the investigating bodies:

  “In my opinion the accident was caused by one thing and a series of contributing factors. As this was the last leg of the trip, it is obvious that the pilot desired to get home or to the Burbank Airport with the least possible delay, and I believe that he intended flying a straight course from Las Vegas, Nevada, to Burbank, California. This would take him considerably to the right of the center of the airway. This is evidenced in one respect by the position or location of the scene at which the accident occurred. It is also my opinion that he had reached his cruising altitude, which, according to flight plan, was 8,000 feet. And probably he struck the cliff at a time when he had leveled off and was making adjustments on his propellers, controls, and manifold pressures, and leaning his mixtures for maximum cruising speeds.

  “It appeared to me that the left wing was the first part of the airplane to make contact with the fac
e of the cliff and this wing made a scar on the face of the cliff which was discernible. This point was plotted on the chart by engineers, and indicates an altitude of 7,769 feet above sea level. Making adjustments on the engines from a climbing attitude to a cruising power, it would be necessary to turn the cockpit lights up so that he could see the instruments better, and I believe that that was the condition when the airplane actually hit the rock.

  “I heard that there was no moon that night, and it has been my experience flying over the western part of the country in rarefied air on a clear night with no moon that it is very dark. You can see the stars, but the outline of a mountain wouldn’t be so prominent to you if you had any lights on to any degree in the cockpit. Although you might not be able to see the stars where a mountain would be, it would appear more as a black void than it would as the shape of a mountain. A contributing factor would be the fact that the route flown from Albuquerque to Las Vegas and then from Las Vegas to Burbank was not according to schedule.”

  Peyton’s statement relied heavily on opinion, supposition, and hearsay regarding key points, particularly his assertion that Williams was in effect attempting a shortcut straight to Burbank. TWA Chief Pilot Golien had previously explained in his testimony that shortcutting—which in this case meant flying over dangerous mountaintops and then through restricted U.S. Army airspace—would have saved a mere “three or four minutes.” Peyton only supposed that Williams would risk his passengers and crew—and his pilot’s license—for a savings of four minutes maximum, although airline pilot and crash investigator Michael McComb said in 2013 on the issue of shortcutting: “Pilots would do that back then just to save a few precious minutes. It was not uncommon, and it was practiced through the 1950s. When air traffic control radar started watching planes en route, then pilots would have to ask to leave course.” Why would pilots take such risks? “To keep an on-time schedule,” answered McComb, “to make up time if running late, but also to save fuel. Airlines back then were very competitive to please the customer, but also to save money. The big boys were United, American, Delta, Eastern, Northwest, and TWA. All at the time boasted fast transcontinental service.”