In stating that the mountain was not visible, CAB investigator Peyton contradicted Capt. Cheney, who had flown over Potosi after the crash and reported that the outline of the snow-covered mountain was visible from the air. Capt. Marshall Wooster, piloting Western Air Flight 11 that night, also reported that he could see the mountaintops from 10,000 feet despite the lack of moonlight.
As David Behncke of the Air Line Pilots Association had stated on February 1, long before findings were rendered by the CAB and the congressional investigators, it was all too easy to “blame the pilot when he was dead and unable to defend himself or point an accusing finger at the actual cause or causes.” And in this case it was also convenient to cite pilot error since no other cause of the crash could be established, and an official cause would never be found, as Behncke had predicted.
These questions can never be answered: If Williams wasn’t looking out his window and flying by the visual references that all pilots used after takeoff from Las Vegas, and if Gillette wasn’t looking at visual references or monitoring the radio range, what were they doing for those 15 minutes? What of the Sperry Automatic Direction Finder that helped the pilot to determine his exact location by triangulating on existing broadcast stations? Was Williams not using it? Was the ADF out of order? Indeed, if Wayne Williams was captaining such a careless ship, how had he survived in the air for 15 years, 13,000 hours, and 1.4 million miles?
As an air carrier, TWA would remain stumped about the crash. “Actually,” began a communication between leaders at company headquarters in Kansas City in May 1943, “there has never been any convincing evidence as to the exact cause of the accident. TWA does not purport to be able to explain how the accident happened; nor do we believe that anyone else can explain it except on a pretty flimsy chain of circumstantial evidence, with most of the links forged out of pure guess.”
But in hindsight—the passage of time along with the collection and synthesis of evidence from the investigating bodies—likely conclusions can be made that may solve the mystery of Flight 3.
The trip of January 15 into 16 had been a tumultuous one throughout, with multiple cargo and weather delays. From Albuquerque on it had been chaotic thanks to the necessity of conveying Army personnel. Yes, Williams knew that a sexy movie star was aboard—certainly not the first he had piloted in 1.4 million miles—and he was responsible for the Army fliers, some of whom he knew and had instructed. But testimony revealed that Williams was a steady and calm pilot and especially conscientious to learn about the Western Division. In several ways the deck was stacked against him on January 16. Circumstances forced him into Las Vegas and not nearby Boulder City. The latter was favorable for the nighttime takeoff of an overloaded plane; the former was not.
Departing out of Las Vegas, Flight 3 was overloaded not by a little, but by a lot, packed as it was with passengers, Army gear, Lombard’s trunks, a heavy load of mail, and fuel levels sufficient to deal with contingencies over Burbank. With that load, the ship still climbed at a normal rate toward a cruise altitude of 8,000 feet as per Gillette’s flight plan, which he continued to use even though it would work for a departure from Boulder City and not Las Vegas. A correct plan from McCarran Field would have called for a flight path due south with a steeper climb rate to achieve a cruise altitude of 10,000 feet, not 8,000, that took into account the mountains at the right edge of Amber Airway Number 2.
What of the orange streaks of exhaust flame trailing the engines that eyewitnesses had reported to Major Anderson? Cool blue flame was the norm for a DC-3 flying at night, not hot orange. The answer to this question also accounts for Calvin Harper’s testimony about the “irregularity of one of the motors.” According to Michael McComb: “Orange flame equals a fuel-rich mixture. Blue flame equals a fuel-lean mixture. Since they were climbing, the mixtures were kept rich to facilitate engine cooling. The witnessed power changes or surges might have been adjustments to propeller RPM, which were also adjusted at climb and cruise. I’ve read in other accidents witness statements saying, ‘the engine sounded like it was changing gears,’ which was just propeller RPM changes.”
With mountains of various sizes surrounding Las Vegas, on an exceptionally dark and moonless night with key navigational aids unavailable, the pilot may have become preoccupied with the issue of the weight and the engines, despite the presence of the lights of Highway 91 and the lights of Arden, including beacon 24.
Another factor was Williams’ lack of familiarity with the Las Vegas-to-Burbank route at night. Since reassignment to the Western Division of TWA, he had flown only once out of McCarran Field at night headed for Burbank. TWA co-pilot Paul Sydney Grave testified that he had been paired up with Wayne Williams to teach him the ropes for flying in the Western Division. When asked by the House Committee about cockpit procedures followed by Capt. Williams in night flying, Grave said, “All the time that I flew with him, why, he liked to keep the plane log and paperwork himself to get more or less in the swing of things out here, because he had not done anything like that out here for some time, and in fact I did most of his flying on most of his trips that I made with him..., and lots of that time, of course, the lights had to be on to do the paperwork.” When asked at what point during the course of the flight that Williams entered data into the log, Grave said, “I believe that he entered them pretty close after the takeoff.”
Did Williams turn over control of the plane to Gillette so the captain could enter data in his log to better familiarize himself with a Las Vegas departure? Definitely yes, according to Earl Korf, the radio operator on duty in Burbank on the evening of January 16. Said Korf, “I don’t believe Wayne was flying the plane on that takeoff. The reason is that all the years I had known Wayne Williams, he always made the radio contacts himself. He knew all the radio operators by name and wanted to make the contacts himself. It was definitely not Wayne who talked to me that night.”
That placed co-pilot Gillette at the controls, and Gillette then would naturally refer to the flawed flight plan that he had created in Albuquerque. With the cockpit lights up to accommodate paperwork and with Gillette confidently steering the ship on course, albeit the wrong course, and climbing to 8,000 as per the flight plan, the co-pilot would not have been reckoning by the lights of the highway or the signal beacon, and the interior lighting reflecting off the cockpit windows would have obscured views of the looming mountain on the darkest possible night. In this scenario, with Williams confident in Gillette’s abilities and filling out his paperwork, he would not have referred to the Automatic Direction Finder and its reference to mountains dead ahead.
The orange flame reported by witnesses as trailing the engines and changes in propeller RPM heard by Calvin Harper serve as testimony of a flight crew stationed in the cockpit (not chatting with Carole Lombard) and hard at work to gain altitude for the passage to Burbank.
Neither Williams nor Gillette seems to have been monitoring the radio range and the on-course signal, but this didn’t constitute an indictment of negligence on their part. The various Flight 3 crash investigations revealed that the standard practice of TWA flight crews was to fly into and out of Las Vegas using visual references only and not instruments or radio signals. No regulations existed for using the radio range, so the pilots simply didn’t bother or feel they needed to use it given the nearly constant clear weather around Las Vegas. Capt. Williams’ fatal mistake was his confidence in Gillette, as he seems to have relied on all his first officers. He might have assumed they were all crack pilots like he was, so he didn’t check his co-pilot’s flight plan when it was created during the commotion on the ground in Albuquerque, when 18 Army Air Corps fliers intended to board Flight 3 and Carole Lombard made a successful defense of her three precious seat assignments. Williams merely assumed that the bright and promising Morgan Gillette had filled out an accurate flight plan, and he hadn’t.
Don Hackett, who had piloted the Western Air Express charter that brought Gable to Vegas, was interviewed by film historian
Richard Roberts in the 1980s. “Hackett recalled hanging around the Las Vegas airport with other pilots discussing the crash,” wrote Roberts in his interview notes, “and some of the pilots who were used to flying in and out of Vegas commented that the Table Mountain area was a bit problematic for takeoff as it went sharply from 4,500 feet to around 8,000 at that part of the mountain known as Double-Up Peak, and it threw pilots not used to taking off out of Vegas airport.” When it was decided that Gable would stay the weekend and wait for the bodies, Hackett was released to take the Western plane back to Burbank. Hackett reported that when he took off for the return trip to Burbank, he realized just how dangerous the mountains were. He hadn’t been familiar with the terrain surrounding Las Vegas, and didn’t know that accepted airways in southern Nevada included jutting mountains within their margins—until he almost hit one.
Said Richard Roberts: “Hackett also discovered one more interesting fact on his own takeoff out of Las Vegas.... When he looked at what was then the standard flight map pilots used of the Vegas landscape, the Table Mountain area, specifically the section indicating the altitude jump at Double-Up Peak, was directly on the place where the map folded up, and as the pilots usually did not unfold the entire map in the cockpit when they were flying, Hackett said the altitude jump was easy to miss. These were still the days of more seat-of-your-pants flying and less technical sophistication.” To Hackett, it was no wonder that disaster had struck a commercial flight departing Las Vegas in the dark.
For all these factors, some as profound as granite mountains and others as subtle as the folds in a map, while still within the boundaries of the correct airway and following accepted procedures, Capt. Williams had struck high terrain. If he had flown 200 yards more to his left, he would have lucked his way clear of the cliffs; if he had flown 300 yards to his right, he would have inched over the peaks. He was 150 or so yards from clearing the mountain vertically. He might as easily have had an “incident,” as it’s called today in the case of a near miss, as an accident.
For Carole Lombard, some facts can’t be disputed. If she hadn’t felt so threatened by Lana Turner that she needed to rush home to Gable at breakneck speed on a plane instead of a train, she would have lived. If she had lost the coin toss, she would have lived. If Flight 3 had not experienced cargo delays at several stops along the way, before and after she boarded, and a two-hour weather delay in St. Louis, the plane would have refueled in daylight at Boulder City, and she would have lived. If she had agreed to vacate the plane in favor of boarding three more Army Air Corps fliers in Albuquerque, she would have lived. If the two extinguished signal beacons had been lit, particularly the one on Potosi, she would have lived. For Lombard, changes to any one of these events would have meant life, and a career rebound, and more patriotic acts, and years with Gable at the ranch, and perhaps popularity on television down the road. Instead, she, Elizabeth Peters, and Otto Winkler took up early residence at the Great Mausoleum in Forest Lawn Glendale.
Changes to some of these events would have meant life for the flight crew and the Ferrying Command personnel. Gillette and Getz would have experienced weddings; Crouch could have proven his late mother wrong when she had told him to stay out of airplanes; Browne would have seen his wife and son, Dittman his bride; the Nygrens would have told tales of a plane trip with Carole Lombard; Affrime would have had the luxury of continuing to worry about his crazy father being drafted into the war; Lois Hamilton would have been reunited with her husband.
A bizarre epilogue at the crash scene proved just how hasty and incomplete the on-scene investigation had been. It was almost as if the cashiered Wayne Clark Williams had decided to issue a protest from the grave. On April 14, three months after the crash, with the snows now melted, five Las Vegas postal workers climbed to the site to search for as-yet unrecovered airmail. The wreckage still lay where it had come to rest, speaking to the horrors of that black January moment.
The visitors did indeed find many pieces of mail, some complete and some partially burned. They also found something else. Up at the base of the cliff, near the spot where Lombard and Lois Hamilton had been found, the post office employees stumbled upon portions of a blue TWA uniform jacket. Inside a pocket, intact, was the wallet of Wayne Williams containing his pilot’s license and other personal papers, almost as if Williams was saying, “Complete investigation? Hogwash!”
But that wasn’t all. A few feet away, the unsuspecting postal workers found a burned human torso.
Recently promoted Colonel Herbert Anderson was called; in turn, Anderson made some calls of his own, one of them to TWA, which dispatched three officials to Las Vegas at once. To these officials, Col. Anderson “expressed the very definite request that this portion of the body be buried at the scene of the crash and that reopening of the inquest and efforts at further identification be avoided if at all possible.” Anderson reasoned that the discovery would only rip apart the wounds of the grieving families, particularly of the three boys who had been cremated and their ashes divided for burial. This was the official excuse he used with Clark County representatives: sensitivity to the families of crash victims. TWA certainly didn’t want more headlines over the crash of its passenger plane, and the government had no interest in its investigation being proven so obviously incomplete.
On Friday, April 17, Clark County Sheriff Glenn Jones, Deputy Coroner Lawrence, and the TWA men climbed to the one place they hoped never to see again. There, said L.W. Goss of TWA, “we found partial remains of a human body consisting of the upper part of the torso and the back portion of the head. This portion was very badly burned on all sides and it was very apparent that any clothing which had been on this portion of the body would have been burned completely. It therefore appeared definitely certain that the portion of the uniform coat which had been found adjacent was not on this body at the time the body was burned….”
In accordance with Col. Anderson’s “urgent request” not to reopen the inquest, the men buried the remains at the scene and the incident never made newspapers. The U.S. Army and TWA now desperately wanted the case of Flight 3 to go away—an unsecured crash scene where artifacts, including human remains, would continue to surface. As Waldon Golien had said, significant articles could be recovered at the Potosi site for years. And since most of Carole Lombard’s jewelry remained unaccounted for, looting was inevitable and the mountain far too dangerous for routine travel.
Three days after the burial of the body, a demolition crew recruited by Deputy Coroner Lawrence and sponsored by TWA rushed to the crash site—as fast as one could rush when climbing a mountain hand over hand—and spent four days attempting to dynamite the cliff above the wreck to bury the wreckage and whatever human remains and artifacts lingered there. But the mountain wouldn’t cooperate, leading Goss to report that “the blasting operations had been very unsuccessful and that although much of the wreckage had been covered with rock, some of the larger pieces, such as wing sections and portions of the tail surface was still visible.” Heavy equipment and a lot more dynamite would be required, meaning a tremendous expense to TWA; at that point the operation was abandoned, and the wreck of Flight 3 was left to time, nature, and the fates.
The scars in the cliff wall made by the nose, wings, and engines of the DC-3 were sufficiently deep that they remained, as did scars on the families of the victims. Fred Peters, who lost a mother and sister, refused to speak about the crash for the remainder of his life, and forbade his son, also named Fred, to fly on a airliners.
Following the death of her new husband, 2d Lt. Fred Dittman, Violet Dittman never remarried and felt his loss another 66 years, until her death in 2008.
Lt. Linton D. Hamilton mourned the death of his wife Lois as he continued to fly for the Army Air Corps, based in Hawaii. Almost a year to the day after the death of his bride, Lt. Hamilton and his flight crew were lost at sea in air combat over the Pacific.
Twenty-one years after the deaths of the Nygren brothers, a Citation of Hon
or of the United States Army Air Force issued to Ed Nygren showed up at their father’s house in Dunbar, Pennsylvania. There was no corresponding honor for younger Bob. Five years after that, Fred Nygren joined his first wife, daughter, and two sons in death at age 83.
Alice Getz’s fiancé, Lt. Robert Burnett, wrote to Alice’s sister Marie: “Every day I picture just what life would be with our darling to share it. I’m lost, Marie, really I am. I didn’t realize it could ever be so terribly hard, but I’m beginning to know. It’s strange how out of all the people I’ve met and meet every day, none approaches the ideals Alice held.”
Her other beau, Bud Ode, also wrote to Marie of his sense of loss: “Sometimes when I’m having quite a lot of fun and seem to be enjoying life for a moment, something will remind me of her and take me back. There are so many things that remind me of her.”
Fred and Katie Getz filed a $25,000 lawsuit against TWA for the wrongful death of their daughter, although they knew this wouldn’t ease the pain or bring back lovely Alice, the baby of the family. “My grandfather was never the same,” said Doris Brieser, the niece of Alice Getz. “He’d sit every night by the window. He had a cross and two candles on the table and every night he’d pray and he’d sit there and cry about her.”
Then there was Mary Johnson, the girl who knew she would see Clark Gable at the termination of Flight 3, only to be bumped in Albuquerque. Mary made the local papers for being the girl who lived, who escaped what one headline labeled a “fiery plane death” to serve through the war as a civil servant for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics at Moffett Field, California. In the capacity of research librarian for NACA, she received a copy of the preliminary report by the CAB on the crash of TWA Flight 3, the one she should have died on. She noted that the report said the plane was overloaded and remembered that indeed it was. And she saw that the pilot had taken the wrong flight path.
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