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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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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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90
IWe don't even have a satisfactory
theory for it' NEWTON LIEURANCE
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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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
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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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