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Vol. 57. No. 25 December 18. 1964

CONTENTS Editorials 4

Stalll!l gov~rnmcnb better shape up

Raggedy Ann; still 'Iouney

LIFE Reviews 12 COmmenl: one critic's view-in doggerel-of

the arts In '64. By Felicia Lamport

TV: everybody his own quarterback. By John

R_ McDermoH

Movi.: Seance on a Wei Afternoon, rClo'iewed by Roald Dehl

Report from Washington 25 A new LIFE department

Letters to the Editors 26

The Pope's Visit to India 28 He enters the gateway to Asia as a 'pilgrim of

peace'

Day of Accusation in Mississippi 34 FBI makes mass arrests in the lynching of three

civil rights workers

New Cultural Center in Los Angeles 40

Death of Vanderbilts' Grande Dame 40B

Medal of Honor for a Vietnam Hero 45

Campus Revolt in California 46A

Wonders of a Cave Find 49 A big spelun:O:ing Jackpot in the Ozarks

Fashion: Up, Up Go the Skirts 59 The new look is the knee look

Red China's Gongo Command Post 66A Alrican consplrac;~s .ne booming LIt Peking's

e.mbilssy in Burundi. By Roy RowiJn

Notre Dame Gets Mad at a Movie 68

Elizabeth Taylor Speaks Out 74 Her uHcr'ly candid commentary on her lite. her

work and Richard Butlon. Photographed lOr

LIFE by Roddy McDowall

Mysterious Killer in the Skies 86 Aviation experts seek safeguards against air

turbulence. By Warren R. Young

Cary Grant Portrays a Beach Burn 99

Great Dinners, Part 12 102 The splendor of a pork crown roast. By Eleanor Graves

Miscellany: the ultimate car pool 108

o I~J.w 1~ ,...Ie, AU. JlIGH1S ~ RE:PRODUCTlON iN wt:Dl.E 'C'R PAAT wrUOlT ·....RlnEN ~115S(lH 15 S1f:ICTlY PAOtIIBlTED

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CtedJtSIlIIl"~~f~tedlram ~h \.:> right by comma~; lop to boHom by d.,she5,

Dee.mDer la.l964 VolumeS7. Num~r 25 LIFE Is publl~ W'Hllty, tJc.p' 0,... ~~ 'I YlJllf ."'d. by Time 1nG.., 540 N.

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EDITORS' NOTE

Fill(lin~' Ollt 00"- the

FUIIIOIIS (;o.tf:ll ,,-it Faille

"Yo" know, it', hard to talk about all this,"' Elizabeth Taylor said to \""ociale Editor Richard ~feryman Jr. "1"m not sure I should."

~-I i".. Ta' lor wa, pall~illg [or a moment, wondering whetber she reali, "anted' her deel' "','ret~ put down lor evervboLl) to !Tarl, She wa" in the mid,t 01 a ~ri('" of inlen·iews "'ith J\1U) man which began in \.l"\\ York la~l I"UIII II1l'f", were carrit'c1 on in automobiles, hoteJ~,

re~t""lIralll~. Wt'rt' l'onlirlll(·d ill ~rll"xil'o-on('t' during a torrential tllllll.lc:r~lortn-andfin~1~"~;- er:dc.'d up la~t wt"C'k in PariF;. Meryman WaS

1'11l·:'lIing a 1Ill'10C.· \\hi("!1 h .... l' long fU5C:Loaled I.l'inl: fallll'! And what it 1111' •.111 .... Lo tlw pt'ople \\'ho hit".: it.

\~jdl' fronl lH'iog Ollr ('dtH:ation and religion editor, Dick !\1er)'lnall

i .... illl(,)l.";t'I.\ illt('re:jlcd iO sturies on the human condition. Th~ son of a ,,~lI·known portrait and landscape painler ano himself married to all artis!. Dick was a ,;econd team AII-Ameriea lacrosse player al

\\ illiall16 J7 FarB ago, iB still a skilled troll t fi:",lJ('rlllClIl and ~kier. Two anJ a

half, .'ar, ~g:o Iw took on his first Ia· mOil- jo;lIhjITl-,~laril.\·1l I\Ifonro('-and LhJ'Oll~ll a :-:,l"rj(o:-- of IOIl~, candid Laped intl'nil'\'''' in-III'!' California hOlIle~ hl" \\<.1:- al.de· lo rt'\c'al \'Ii.lril~n in all her

g-II:->Lo i.llld warllltl, and IHlf'c°rlainLy.

I.a~( ~pr,jllg Dil·k applit·d hi:-- pailb­

laking inll'n i('\\ il1~ Il"dJ11 iqllC" lo Sir l.alln'nlT ()Ii\'it~r tu di~cll):-'l' \\'l1al Lhl' \\llrld-:=, ~I'l'al(':-'t .H'lo[" theHlghl aLollt

hi" art. hi, "eli.·f•. hi" I"·,,italiolls. "Oli­TAYLOH .\~D MBHY~lAi\

\ ilT i~ all 0\'("[\\ helmjng-, a\H'~OIJH' per­

'<HI." "a", Diek ... \11 Ihe tillll' r "a" \\illl him I \\;1:.. a\\'an' uf hi .... \"ol(·<.Il1i(' qualiLy. RUL he wa~ extremely graeioll.-. Thai SeL'III,; III be a part of Ihese people who arc ~bsolutely

at the lop of their rrok~"iun"."

III II", beginlling o[ Diek'" interview~ the lalk is usually quite s"perfieia!. Tllt'll eOIllL" a period when the ."hjects begin to reali7.c the po."ibiliti.." tl"l1 arc here reall) to e'pr~s" themselves. Marilyn n'Td"d the least alllollllt of wann-llp tillle: she had prepared heJ'seJ[ and knl'w "hat;;h~ wanl ..o to .ay. Always there is that last aH­imporLallt i'll('rview. "YOII wait ror it:' says Dick. "and then sudJen­I.- it i, happening: th".' hav~ finall.-- [onnd the \\,(lrd~ to BaY the things lht'~ had \,"anfeel (0 :-'<1.\ all along and it all curnes out:'

On th., 1,;lizah('(h Tadur -ror) which begin;; on page 74 of this i"",,'. Dick w·nrk"d wit h al'tllr.photograpller RoddY l'vIc Dowall, a close Iriend of \li,.- Ta) lor'". w110 phnlographed our eover and the pictures in .... idt· Ihl' Jl1a~azln{'. During tltt' 111an~ hours of interviewing for the

"",," Di"k w·a' "lnll'k In the "omplel" attention that Elizabeth gavc to him. T\(l("(' :,11«: l'ri('d-noth time~ \\·h('n s.hr wa~ (li~ct1ss1ng her 'T,"'tation. \1 the end she said. "You did goo,!." Says Dick, "I 1holl:::hl rd n"n'r haYe anotlwr chanc-e to hug Elizabeth Taylor, so r did. (\nd Iwr "hronic-,"!)- b3d ba"k wellt SNAP. She looked up and "aid. ''I'hal'" all right. 1.11\. It felt good:"

r;7p/f-~ GEOIlGC P. HUNT !'v[anagilll!, Editor

3

~-

.Jetliners face unknbwn peril of savage winds

./ "

by WARREN R. YOUNGTHE SKY Rain had been falling in fitful out docilely despite the weather to out in the Atlantic to circle the as bright blotches on their cock'pit spurts on Miami's airport and gusts join the eight crew members al­ line squall which had been moving radar. As he aligned the swept­of wind galloped back and forth ready aboard the sleek red-white­ in all day; others had merely zig­ back. willowy wings of his 90-ton, across the apron. The 35 passengers and-bluejelliner. Other planes were zagged between the thunderstorm four-jet Boeing 720B at the cast for Flight 70S, anxious to reach flying in and out. Some had swung cells-the violent nuclei of thun­ end of the runway, Northwest Air­Chicago and points west, trooped almost to Bimini Islands 55 miles derstorm systems-which showed lines' Captain Roy Almquist had

CONTINUED

'You vectored us right into that turbulence . . . we will turn as soon as we can'

TURBULENCE CONnNUEO

two miles of visibilit). And >0. at just n seconds after I:35 p.m. on Feb. 11. 1963. he took on' into the troubled air.

Climbing towan] altitude. and Irying always to keep to the clear parts of the sky. Captain Almquist swung the jet back and forth from heading to heading. first toward thc south. then to the west. Iinall)' turning IOward the northwest. Rou­tinely. he and thc air-tramc con­trollers on the !!round al!reed b, radio on each eh~lI1ge in his cours~. Once he objected to 11 suggested heading: ...... Negative. You vec­lOred us right into that moderate­to-heavy turbulence. We arc out of 10 [tho;Lsandj now. We will turn right as soon as we can." A little later Captain Almquist reported that he could see open sky ahead. And then. not quite 13 minutes arter take-all', Flight 705 disap­peared from the tranic center's ra­darscope. Before the traec faded, the 'controller marked the route leading up to the empty spot on the !!Iass with it black crayon.

\Vithin minuteS the Ci~il Aero­nautics Board. which investigates each Rying accident in the U.S .. had launched a massive and metic­ulous detective hunt. Just after nightfall. search parties in track­

treaded vehicles and helicopters reached the charred and twisted re­mains of the jetliner, scattered on the saw grass in the spongy, deso­late swamps of Everglades Nation­al Park. All who had been aboard were dead. The soft algae-laden soil. soaked with 15 tons of fuel. burned quietly like the wick of :I

I..erosene lamp. Looking for clues that would pin

the blame on Qlan, natuTe or ma­chine, the CAB men began their grim sorting. or facts from among themutedsymbolsoftragedy. They found the plane's automatic Right recorder. ;tssteel con ta inerscorched but its contents still there. They ,tuck yellow plastic Rags in the ground to mark the e.,aet spots from which bodies wer~ gathered. The)' located the plane's tail sur­faces. separated from each other and far from the main wreckage. In a hangar they reconstructed the plane. fastening the piece, to a chicken-wire frame.

Gradually. thc shape of the jet­liner emerged once morc. ,ilent. unmoving.disemboweled.ln Wash­ington, D.C. the creases on th, Right recorder's metallic tape­;howing speeds, headings. altitude and acceleration forces in the last seeonds--were studied under high. power binocular microscopes.

The maze of clues added up to

PATTERN FOR In i..\ grl.:i.1tly simplified diagram of the forces which produce turbulence and their action on a jetliner. a plane i shown flying in an area of thunder­storms. As the pilot aims foran appar­enll) clear space between two storm cell>. the plane encounter" a storm­generated updraft which sends it hur­tling upward despite the pilot's efforts to k~p the nose down. Meanwhile. the high-alii tude current of winds

ISASTE known as the jet stream ("hown as a corkscrew) has been deRected by the updrafts. producing a savage down­draft between the cells. When the plane encounters this force. it could be sent into a dive. The actions the pilot has been tak ing to counteract the updraft could now have the cata­strophiceflect of accelerating the dive -as may have happened in several t,ctual instances-bringing on a crash.

an awesome riddle. Apparently the powerful craft had been wrested from the experjenced hands of its pilots and hurled 10 earth. But how this could have happened was nOt yet cku. Was some invisible force of nalUre responsible" Some Raw in the flight systems devised by man which might be identified and corrected? Or was it simply an im­ponderable coup of fatc?

The formal hearinllSon the crash. held in Miami. indicted both the works of man and the worl..ings of nature. The implication, wellt for bdfcrnd'the bounds of this partic­ular tragedy. The 1.445 pages of evidence help to explain a number of jet crashes and mishaps. And they launched a fretful debate. be­hind the ,eenes, over what counter­steps should bc taken to prevent a repetition.

Aprize witness at the hearings was Paul Higgins. a Boeing Com­panyengineer. He was armed with a computer analysis of data on the plane's design and on information recovered from the crashed plane's flight recorder. Higgins's testimony sketched in the first major strokes of an outline of what probably happened 10 Flight 705. Taken to­gether with other expert views. it provides a recognizable picture of the jetliner's last 45 seconds.

At n minutes after take-off, Flight 705 was climbing up through an altitude of 17.000 feet, going about 300 mph and heading to­ward what Captain Almquist had described on the radio as clear air. He had already run into one fairly rough spot.

At this poillt. the indications are that the plane suddenly Rew into a huge updraft of air. Captain Alm­quist. almost surely "'ithout any warning, found himself in a terri­fyingclimb. Likea monstrous hand, the vertical current shoved the heavy plane upwards. at a rate of ~.gOO feet per minute.

Captain Almquist might have tried to lower the nose to keep the air speed from slacking olf during the dizzying rise into thinner air. Jn addition the rough air "'as prob­ably shaking the plane. '>,hichcouJd have convinced him that it was about to stall. adding urgency to his efforls to push the nose down. To make mailers far worse. he was probably having great difficulty determining his pJane's attitude in the sky-Whether it was pointed up or down, rolling to the right or Jeft. The instruments that normal­ly do the job in a jet were no doubt

shaking and rolling too much to be of any use.

Then, JUSt nine seconds after en­tering the powerful updraft, the jet apparently emerged intoaJ1 equall~

violent downdraft. And, at about this time, Captain Almquist's fran­tic attempts to lower the nose seem to have finally taken ellect-far too much elfect. The plane, more perfectly streamlined Ihan any ar­ro,,·, plunged over into a straight­down dive. Accelerating quickl), perhaps to supersonic velocit). it plummeted toward earth, tipping a bil farther than rhe vertical until it \\as pitched slightly on its back. When a mile and a half of alti­\LIde remained, the pilots-hanging from their seat belts. unable to read any of the tumbJine instruments and trying to overco;:;'e forces that would make each arm reel as if it weighed 45 pound s made a linal, futile effort to achieve a pull-out. Their action did manage to change ­the angle of the diw--about 10 degrees. or just enough to accom­plish a straight-do"'n plunge.

During the pull-out atlempt the tail lOre olf the plane. The whole craft then came apart in the air. its fuel caught fire and, just 20 sec­onds after it had nosed over al­most four miles above. the broken jet hit the swamp.

Whatever else had gone wrong with Flight 705-and 22 months after the crash the CA B had yet to assign the official cause of the crash-it was evident from Hig­gins's testimony that the trigger­ingcircumstance in the catastrophe must have been an encounte~with a long underrated and lillIe under­stood force of nature which lurks in the skies. It is called turbulence.

The eerie paLlern of .disaster which emerged could equally well fit, in many ways. a series ofliteraI­ly dozens of accidellls, fatal and nonfatal, all involving jets over the past five years. In all of these mis­haps turbulence appears to be the common denominator.

Turbulence is. simply, rough or ,,~itated air. Like the ocean, the e;rth's sea of air is constantly in motion. Aviators have always known that perils waited in the air's crosscurrents. eddies and \-\-aves. But in the slower aircraft of the past. there usually was time to recover-even from violent, turbu­lence-created upsets. In compari­son with the many other hazards to which propeller planes were sub­ject, rough ai I' was considered a minor problem. When the high-

CONTINUED

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u.s. Wealiler Bure(1/I

TURBULENCE CONTINUEO

flying jets came to the U.S. five years ago. pilots were told they would travel "above the weather"' most of the time.

But as the jet age unfolded. the thin cold air of the upper altitudes has been found to harbor turbu­lence more violent than had ever

......been imagined. No one yet fully unde'rstands these forces.

"All we know:' says Newton Lieurance. director of Aviation Weather Affairs for the U.S. Weather Bureau. "is that the air will be violently agitated within most. thunderstorms and along the jet streams in the upper air. The streams are like high-speed rivers of air meandering across the sky. The difference between the wind speed of the jet stream and the sur­rounding air may be 200 mph. and the shearing action that results produces swirling eddies. We also know:' says Lieurance. "that there are vertically rotating wavcs of air that come rolling off the Icc side of mountains like breakers on a monstrous sea.

"Not long ago. we thought that about summed up the causes of turbulence. Now we've had to change our minds. We don't even kno\; what types exist. We really don't have even a satisfactory the­ory for turbulence and it looks as though we won't have for years to come."

The turbulence that pilots have actually encountered seems to oc­cur in a bewildering number of places. heights and sizes. It has been discovered in the rarefied lev­els above 50,000 feet, where previ­ous theory held that there could be none. It has been found over every part of the country. in clear skies and foul, at low, medium and high altitudes. An area of dangerously turbulent air may be several miles in width or mere feet. The condi­tion may last for just a few seconds or for an hour.

Yet. by and large, U.S. meteor­ologists still must rely for their knowledge of today's weather on balloons, which are sent up every six or 12 hours from just 80 sta­tions located about 200 miles apart across the U.S. "We do a pretty good job of forecasting," says Lieurance, "butonlyfor large-scale weather. We usually can tell the farmer or the businessman what he wants to know-primarily whether

it will rain-with fair accurdcy. We have even reached the point where we are predicting the likelihood of upper-air turbulence occurring within imaginary 'boxes' of air space several m.i1es on a side. But here we still hit it right only aboul half the time."

Crashes of pre-jet airliners usual­Jy could be traced to some correct­able weakness in the machine or some error committed by the man at its controls. Precisely because they were traced. most such haz­ards have by now been eliminated from modern air transport. U.S. airlines last year carried 71 million paying passengers a total of 50 bil­lion miles and took only 121 lives. Bicycles and bathtubs each kill sev­eraltimes as many. Actually. trav­eling the highway to the airpert can be the most hazardous ponion ofajettrip. Thejetsare enormous­ly satisfying both for the pilots whQ fly them and the passengers who fly in them.

Yet for all their vaunted per­formance as history's best trans­portation device. jetliners seem pe­culiarly vulnerable to rough. roil­ing air. Their swept-back wings. their marvelous streamlining. their need for complete reliance on a cockpit full of instruments and their intricate power-driven control surfaces combine to create a high­spirited but delicately balanced ma­chine. Ordinary gusts of wind can­not faze the jet. But, as,the Miami crash hearings revealed, turbulence is something else.

During the months following the Everglades crash, while safety officials pondered the evidence of the hearings and tried to decide what if anything ought to be done, the problem of turbulence began to loom larger and larger.

In July 1963, five months to the day after the Miami crash. a Unit­ed Air Lines jet tried to climb above a line of midnight clouds over O'Neill, Ncb., 30 miles from the nearest thunderstorm. The air roughened. the nose pitched up uncontrollably (Captain L. E. Duescher and his copilot thought that it. was pointed straight up) and the plane fell into a slanting dive. As the speed passed the limit that the airframe was designed to with· stand safely. the controls became "frozen" b;' the onrusb.ing air. The pilots dared to slam on more pow·

CONTINUED

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BOBBIE CAB Safety Bureau

International Airport, Va., aimed struck again. Within a few days at a gap between thunderstorm this theory was refuted by the 000000000000 cells 10 to 30 miles away. When CAB. The disaster, they said, was still not a mile high, it hit what the second case in civil aviation

ments, finally rolled.- the plane

they must have hit a tornado. those couple of minutes one engine Three months after that in Texas pod support was cracked. After­

an Eastern Air Lines DC-8 being wards Captain Schmidt reported: 000000000000

flown by Copilot Grant Newby ") can't honestly say that a perSOIl

planes two air-speed indicators specd into Lake Pontchartrain. swing to zero. Pilot Newby pushed Searchers on barges laboriously his control column forward to put fished up two thirds of the plane,

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1964

000000000000Several passengers had been tossed In addition to these instances to the ceiling and injured and one there are records in the files of jet engine had torn entirely off the the CAB of more than 25 lesser

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er. As they had hoped, the nose lifted enough for the controls to take hold. The plane pulled out at 12,000 feet. Nobody was badly in­jured, so technically the incident was not an accident-yet 59 terri­fied human beings had fallen, com­pletely out ofcontrol ,for five miles.

The next month an Eastern Air Lines DC-8 took off from Dulles

matic flight recorder. But there were striking similarities to the se­ries of U.S. turbulence mishaps.

By that time the hazard of rough air was becoming so apparent in technical circles that when a Pan American 707 exploded nine days later in a storm near Elkton, Md_~

aviation experts everywhere as­sumed at first that turbulence had

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Captain Stephen Parkinson was to caU "the most violent jolt I have ever experienced in over 20,000 hours of flying." He felt, he said, as if he were sitting on the end of a huge tuning fork. Then the plane flipped over sideways, almost on its back. When the pilots, who could no longer read their instru­

history where lightning had prob­ably ignited a plane's fuel. But be­fore that announcement came, the Elkton crash ironically had final­ly generated the first real sense of urgency about turbulence. Hur­ried, high-level meetings of avia­tion officials were quietly convened across the country.

1964 ~~

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right side up, using a deck of clouds for a guide, the big jet was just 1,325 feet above the ground. ]n the cabin a baby boy had slipped from the grasp of his mother, who re­calls, "I could see my baby lying on the ceiling, crying." After land­ing, the captain told a passenger

This past January an American Airlines 707 flying near Alamosa, Colo. suddenly hit a "terrifically sharp jolt" of air, which tossed the plane about savagely but did not wrest it completely from Captain H. D. Schmidt's control. During

1964

{italings

under the command of Captain Mel French was climbing into an arch of clouds between two thun­derstorm cells and heading toward the blue. At 18,000 feet they hit a bump "Ii ke driving across a rail­road track." To their utter aston­ishment both pilots and the flight engineer saw the needles on the

t964 was in control of the airplane ... you don't get panicky but a man would be an idiot to say you don't get scared... "

In February an Eastern DC-8 took off near storms at New Or­leans. Nine minutes later, from causes as yet unknown. the jet with its 58 occupants dived at high

lhe nose down and pick up speed, but the jet swooped over "Ii~e a roller coasler" into an uncontrol­lable, high-speed dive. After all else failed, Captain French put the four engines into reverse and lhe plane pulled out between cloud layers with jusl 5,000 feet to spare. rough."

the largest remnant being a five­foot seclion of the tail. The copilot on the plane was Grant Newby, who had survived the wild dive over Texas three months earlier. One pilot who had taken off just before reported that "the air was {}talings

plane, but lhe captain managed to land safely.

rn November a year ago a Trans­Canadian Air Lines DC-8 crashed four minutes after take-off from storm-swept Montreal, killing all 118 aboard. Unlike U.S. jets, the Canadian plane carried no auto­

turbulence-related accidents to jet­liners since 1960. In many of these cases the planes were knocked about by forces greater than their supposed structural limits. In these cases at least] 8 stewardesses and passengers were hurled about the cabin and seriously injured, usual-

CONTINUED

t~..

91

TURBULENCE CONTINUED

Iy because they were not belted in. Among. je.tliner pilots the shop

talk has long been that turbulence was the villain in a great many additional near-tragedies which went unreported only because the injuries and damage proved too slight to be officially classified as accidents.

Yet as late as this past summer nobody was willing to admit any­thing officially. Shortly before he was appointed director of its crash­investigating Safely Bureau in Oc­tober, the CAB's Bobbie R. Allen indicated that all the talk among pilots, passengers and weather men about rough skies might well prove to be just so much hot air. "If I were trying to write a best-selling novel," he said, ''I'd put 'turbu­lence' in the title-there seems to be so much interest. We don't know if we have a turbulence prob­lem OF not."

Najeeb Halaby, boss of the Fed­eral Aviation Agency, said, "[ can discern neither a pattern nor a panacca, and so I don't sleep so well nights. This is a terrible ad­mission to make, but I wouldn't know what to do about it if we did prove turbulence was the cause. J guess wc think that the system

II had to try and find out what

had happened to US' CAPTAIN MEL FRENCH

Eastern Air Lilies Pilot

of corrections we've launched will be the answer."

Throughout 1963, federal ac­tion taken against the turbulence danger was limited to advice to air crews. In November of that year, nine months after Flight 70S crashed, the FAA recommended a new "turbulence penetration" speed. The existing procedure had called for slowing from cruising airspeeds (around 550 mph) to about 300 mph when rough air was expected or encoun teredo Jet pilots were now urged to slow only to 325 mph. The agency also warned that if the pilot chose to keep the autopilot engaged during turbu­lence, he should disconnect its alti­tude-balding circuits which could tilt the plane to dangerous angles. And pilots coping with rough air were also cautioned against mak­ing any adjustment of the hori­zontal stabilizer-the part of the plane's tail which looks like a

miniature wing and to the rear of which are the elevators.

Behind the changes in the rec­ommended piloting procedures lay a more complex concern. It was spclled out in a nOW-classic tech­nical paper by Northwcst Airlines' director of flight standards, Paul Soderlind. In it he pointed out similarities in the behavior of Flight 705 before its crash and th~or.the planc which dived but recovered over O'Neill, Neb. He re-em phasized some points which, supposedly, pilots already knew.

Jetliners can "stall"-that is, their wings can lose tbeir lift-not only if the air speed drops too low but also if it gets too high. At high altitudes or under stress im­posed by abrupt aerial maneuvers or turbulent winds, the two stall­ing speeds begin to converge. The plane above O'Neill, Neb., for ex­ample, climbing above clouds at heights near its aerodyn lmic ceil­

ing, was threading a narroW path between a low-speed stall and a high-speed stall when it was thrown into its long dive.

The chief danger from an un­expected stall, or nose-oyer, is that lowering a jetliner's nose more than about 30° from horizontal means serious trouble. In a 90° straight-down dive such as Flight 705's, a Boeing witness admitted that even if all the other condi­tions relating to plane, pilots and weather had bee" ideal, 17,000 feet might not be enough room to al­Iowa pull-out.

The reason a pull-out from a steep dive is so nearly impossible lies in the jet's speed-laying design -its marvelous streamlining. De­spite its great lcngth and wingspan (each dimension is equal to the height of a 12-story building), the drag of the air as it moves past the entire I [,OOO-or-so square feet of a jetliner's metal skin at any normal flying speed is no more than that which it would meet upon hitting the flat side of a seven-by-eight-foot barn door. This streamlining, coupled with the tug of gravity upon its mass of up to [60 tons, turns a diving ­jet into an accelerating projectile. In the cockpit time literally co[­lapses. At best, even in a sloping

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dive, perhaps 15 seconds are avail­able in which the pilot must make the decisions and take the actions that can avert disaster.

The Miami hearings touched also on a 'econd feature or the jets' design that could cancel out even those few seconds of cockpit decision time: the near-impossi­hility or rcading the attitude in­'Irument, called "the artificial ho­rizon," whcn the plane is pitched into an extreme position or when it is being buffeted. Except on a bright clear day when the horizon is clearly distinguishable to the pilot, it is virtually impossible to keep a jetliner flying straight and level without the help of instru­ments. Among the planes which were thrown out of control by turbulence, the only ones which recovered were those that fell into clear sky, where their pilots were able to align themselves visually, with either the ground or a level layer of clouds. Many airlines have therefore "et to work to modify iheir altitude instruments, making them larger and in some cases adding words or colors to their faces to make them easier to read.

A third aspect of jetliner design may play an even more significant

I't was like sitting on the end of a

huge tuning fork' CAPTAIN STEPHEN PARKINSON

Eastern Air Lilies Pilof

part in rough-air accidents than ei­ther superstreamlining or unread­able instruments. In the crash of Flight 705 and in two other fatal crashes-at Montreal and at New Orleans-the horizontal stabilizer in the tail was found in each case to have been adjusted to an ex­treme "nose-down" position.

The stabilizer can be tilted only a few degrees up or down, a nea~­Iy imperceptible diirerence to the eye. Yet if it is sct in maximum nose-down position while in a dive, a crash becomes imminent. In the normal course of operations the pilots or the autopilot fre­quently adjust the stabilizer set­ting: for example, 10 rebalance the plane when its center of grav­ity shifts, as it does when several passengers walk to the tail sec­tion at the same time.

The telltale items of wreckage which fixed the exact stabilizer position in each of these three

fatal crashes were the jackscrews -40-inch steel rods with spiral threads. Located in the tails of all jets, they are power-operated and they "jack" the front edge of the stabilizer up or down, just like an auto jack.

How did Flight 705's stabilizer ~'come to be in such a fatal nose­

down position') There are several possible explanations. Simple pi­lot error could have been magni­fied by confusion over.fiTherthe plane's attitude or the setting of the stabilizer. Or the jackscrew mechanism could have malfunc­tioned. Or, if the autopilot was flying the plane, Captain Alm­quist and his copilot may have tried to overpower it-which is supposed to be possible with no more than a 30-pound pUll on the control column. If so, as they lift­ed the elevators to avert a steep dive, the robot might simply have fought baek by adjusting the sta­

bilizer jackscrews, brainlessly re­acting against any force trying to alter its control.

However it got there, the sta­bilizer on Flight 705 was in ex­treme nose-down position and, once the jet picked up diving speed, it became a nearly hope­less matter to try to readjust it. The swift flow of air would have been too strong to be overcome by the drive-motor controlling the jackscrews.

Finally recognizing the multi­plicity of ways in which the sta­bilizer can be moved in to a dan­gerous position, the airlines reset a "limit-stop" device on all 707s, 720s and DC-8s, permilling only a fraction as mUch nose-down ad­justment as before. This may be enough to eliminate the hazard. But some airline pilots say addi­tional tail changes may be needed -perhaps a g.reater area of mov­able control surfaces to help bal­ance the bulky planes in the sky, perhaps a stronger drive-motor for the jackscrews, perhaps an im­proved indicator on the control panel which will show the precise position of the stabilizer at every instant.

Other airmen argue that a care­ful re-evaluation of the caprices of the autopilot is in order. "I

CONTINUED

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'Every thunderstorm is a tornado to me­

no matter what' CAPTAIN F. D. VORIS

TWA Pilot

TURBULENCE CONrlNUED

welcome any help," says TW A jet Captain F. D. Voris, who went through one of the first recorded jet-turbulence incidents in 1960. "But 1 know that the robot is not as good a pilot as 1 am. And I'm sure that the plane can be torn apart whenever a pilot's mind and

-.the pseudo mind in that box part company."

Modifying equipment and fly· ing techniques may improve tile chances of a jetliner caught in tu rbulence, but these steps shed little light on the nature of tur­bulence itself. And there seems to be no short cut to new knowl­edge. "Extreme turbulence," says one worried expert, "is like a rare wild animal. If you really want to study it, you must hunt it down."

One attempt to get close to the beast and to chart the relationship between thunderstorms and tor­nadoes and turbulence was made by a team of 10 Weather Bureau scientists at Kansas City who were engaged in the National Severe Storms Project between 1956 and 1963. With Air Force pilots they flew deliberately into the heart of thunderstorms-and amassed a total of more than 17 hours collect· ing data at jet altitudes. Some of their findings recently have made weathermen drastically revise even such classical assumptions as they had. "When we encountered [gusts of) 208 feet per second [142 mph]," said NSSP director Clayton Van Thullener, testifying at the Miami crash hearings, "1 was shocked. Now that we encounter 360 feet per second [245 mph] 1 am getting a little more used to it."

The mechanical action of the thunderstorm cell itself, which air­line pilots have long known they must avoid, is basically related to many types of turbulence. Except for the furinel ofa tornado-which is often generated by it-a thun­derstorm cell contains the most concentrated violence found in meteorology. The storm cell may be a swirling column five miles across; the tornado funnel hun­dreds of feet or less. Yet the ener­gy within either of them is literally equal to that of a small A-bomb.

From the top of a thundercloud formation a dreaded dark "anvil" cloud often stretches out like a plume. It is in such a complex that the funnel of a tornado may

be spawned, reaching a narro\\ whirling finger to earth and suck ing objects aloft. Each year in th U.S., observers report about 6)­full-fledged tornadoes. Yet pilot and storm experts know that man other unreported funnels exten' down only part way and arc al most invisible.

"To me, every thunderstorm i a tornado," says Captain Vori! "no matter what the book dcfini tion may be."

A long squall line of thunder storms of the tornado-bearin: type was, in fact, carefully fol lowed by the Weather Bureau' Donald House as it traveled acros half the continent in Februar: 1963. When it was about 75 mile from Miami on the morninlt 0

the 12th, the decision was mad, to downgrade the forecast to ales ser hazard-brief hours befor' the crash of Flight 705.

The part that disturbs me. says House, "is that because it wa: reaching the edge of the map, w< could no longer predict what i would do. The Gulf of Mexico i, a 'sparse data area.' We had ne stations there and had to depene on reports from ships at sea."

Two pilots who survived unex­pected dives last year-Captair French and Captain Parkinson­believe that their planes must have encountered the invisible vorte\ of a developing funnel cloud. Half· way convinced that he was livinF on borrowed time after being sec· onds from a crash, Captain French took time off and spent thousand~

of dollars of his own money to c\· plore the technical possibilities oi his theory. He reasoned that only the high winds at the edge of " twister-moving in his plane's di­rection-could have nullified hi, air speed, as his indicators hat! shown. Despite official Jack of in­terest in his efforts, the captain found 19 physical factors corrob­orating his view. Weatherman Van Thullenar also studied the Cap­tain French hypothesis in detail and concluded: "We cannot ei­ther prove or disprove such an as­sumption. However, he was in a region of wind shear which could have been strong enough to pro­duce eddies of a vortex nature."

A really serious effort to track down all of the more savage forms of turbulence would probably

CONTINUED

TURBULENCE CONTINUED

require heavily instrumented jet planes which would deliberatcly and repeatedly lly into truly rough air. To convert a jetliner to this purpose might cost as much as 53 million-less than half its original cost-but so far such a program has found little official support.

A much less ambitious cam­paign is now being planned. NASA is equipping and modify­ing a smaller. straight-winged jet of the type usually used as private executive transports with an elab­orate electronic computer. The computer will "fool" both the plane 'jDd its pilots into reacting exactly as if the plane were a full­sized airliner but without the ris~

of being unable to recover if up­set. The lirst such "mock jetliner" will not be ready for turbulence research until about 1966. The Air Force also has announced a newly stepped up program to measure turbulence at various heights, us­ing U-2s and lighters as well as jet tankers and bombers. Again, it may be years before the results help commercial airline flights.

Meanwhile, without a catalog of t.he varieties of turbulence or a workable theory to explain them, attempts are being made to de­tect it. Special radar sets such as the Weather Bureau uses and jet­liners carry can indeed spot nearby storm cells (except for certain seg­ments which produce no radar echo at all) and fully developed tornadoes. as well as clouds and rai.n, but not all rough air. Several airlines, universities and industrial and government groups are hope­fully testing airborne devices which may give warning of turbulence directly. Thesc include heat meas­urements, laser beams and electri­cal chargc detectors.

Undetectable and indescribable as the nature of rough air may be, one Llf the more surprising

The funnel of a tornado, the most dramatic form of turbu­lent air, drops down out of a blaek sky over Dallas, Tex'ls.

II see neither pattern nor panacea-I don't

sleep well nights' NAJEEB HALABY

FAA Dil'telol'

revelations of the Miami hearings had to do with the hit-and-miss fashion by which even such weath­er information as does exist was delivered to the airline pilot.

Although all the other factors in air safety have been studied, corrected and writtcn into the reg­ulations, weather information has, in effect. been left out of the "pa~k­age." While the Weather Bureau is the main source of in-flight weather information. the respon­sibility for getting this data to the pilots has until this year been left entirely to the individu.al airlines. Moreover, except for the required concurrence by his company dis­patcher that the weather is good enough to ta~e off, the use a pilot makes of whatever weather infor­mation he has is left solely to him.

The nation's air-traffic control network. which approves the exact path each jetliner follows. does not even steer pilots clear of the very worst weather. Until a few hours before Flight 705 took off, the Weather Bureau had been transmitting warnings of the like­lihood of tornadoes north of Mi­ami. But at the time the traffic controllers gave Captain Almquist his headings, they themselves had no accurate details of the existing weathcr. And they had virtually no training in interpreting weather data from radar.

The air-traffic center did happen to have on hand, as stand-by equipment for aircraft surveillance, one old-fashioned Navy radar that would pave been a ble to register some weather concentrations. But this set was turned off on the day of the crash. Quite conectly, the controllers were using their first-

line, "improved" radar which showed thcm the positions of planes more clearly because it tuned out most signals reflected from the storm cells.

Fifty miles away a weather sta­tion's radar w"s pin-pointing all these cells, but pictures on its scopes were not relayed to the air­traffic control center. At some air­ports the weather station's radar pictures are actually carried by coaxial cables sepl .~liles to a branch office of tlie bureau at the terminal-but not the last few feet into the controller's station.

None of these situations is an "irregularity." They are standard practice for the entire air-traffic system run by the Fcderal Avia­tion Agency. which assigns to its 14,GGO hard-pressed traffic control­lers, working at 270 airports and in 21 en-route airway centers one paramount duty-to prevent the planes in the air from colliding with one another.

In the end the men who now must make the decisions on the possible dangers of turbulence are the airline pilots themselves. The FAA gives them no criteria for fly­ing through bad weather. Today, with the FAA's tacit approval,jet­liners are flying between known thunderstorm cells as little as 10 miles apart. They also are routine­ly flying through geographic sec­tors Within which tornadoes have been forecast. When, however, a pilot guesses wrong and his planc or passengers are hurt by rough weather, the FAA can invoke a catchall rule against operating an aircraft in a "careless or reckless manner."

The director of the independ­ent Flight Safety Founda'tion, Jer­ry Lederer, is disturbed by this par­

adox: "Neither the designers, the airlines nor the FAA are subject to punitive action, even when they ap­prove designs or follow procedures which invite accidents or incidents. Should the airman be~"

During the past year the FAA has finally begun to face the prob­lem of turbulence and to patch some holes in its operation. It has asked the airlines~on a voluntary basis-to urge the use of seat belts by passengers even when the warn­ing light is off. 1t is seeing to it that every pilot receives a one-day train­ing course devoted to the latest knowledge about turbulence. The agency has also undertaken a proj­ect, with the help of the Weather Bureau, designed to relay more weather information into traffic control centers and to train traf­fic controllers in the basics of inter­preting radar weather data. To do its part on even this limited project, the Weather Bureau had to "steal" some moncy already allocated to what is officially regarded as the No. I priority aviation weather problem-the need to develop a blind, all-weather landing system.

One of the enduring oddities of the jet age is that the Weather Bu­reau is still a minor appendage of the Commerce Department, where­as the CAB and FAA have long been independent aviation agen­cies. The Weather Bureau labors on with the World War 11 methods and a minuscule budget: $7 mil­lion a year for its still-primitive upper-air balloon observations, and at most $100,000 for the much-needed studies of the mys­teries of violent turbulence.

"Possibly a tradition of fund­starvation has kept U.S. weath­er scientists pure," says onc ex­pert sarcasticallY. "But it seems strange that it's so much easier to get money to study the atmosphere on the moon than to hunt down the unknowns of turbulence here on earth. Wouldn't it seem reason­able to invest a small sum in basic research-say, $8 mill.ion~ That's just about the cost of one jetliner."

10..-.. ~. - .. - -. ~

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