1940 air crash took a toll not soon forgotten

The skies above Charlottesville were cloudy, and rain was expected before nightfall on Aug. 31, 1940.

That Saturday morning Mrs. Ralph Hale had said goodbye to her friends — Lily Logan Morrill and her husband, Albert H. Morrill. She had been visiting them at their historic Albemarle County estate, Enniscorthy.

Before Mrs. Hale left for Washington, where she would catch a flight back home to Pittsburgh, the friends likely made plans for their next get-together. Tragically, before day’s end, Mrs. Hale would be a victim of what was at the time the worst disaster in the history of commercial air travel in this country.

The incident became known as the Lovettsville air disaster, named for the small Virginia town near where the Douglas DC-3 crashed. No definitive cause for the crash ever has been established, but bad weather was the major factor.

Weather delay

Mrs. Hale had booked a flight on Pennsylvania Central Airlines. At the time the airplane was scheduled for departure, a vicious rainstorm was pounding the airfield.

The flight was delayed in order to give the storm time to clear the area. After waiting for half an hour, the plane taxied out onto the runway.

Although thunderstorms still were in the area, the airplane — with 21 passengers and a crew of four — was cleared to take off. Just 23 minutes later the airplane slammed into a clearing 35 miles west of Washington, killing everyone on board.

Farmers living in the area had heard the roar of engines just before the crash. The following day, J.J. “Slim” Carmichael, vice president of the airlines, said both engines of the airplane were apparently “wide open” when it crashed.

Powerful impact

The DC-3 had hit the ground with such speed and force that many of the passengers had been cut in two by their safety belts. Jerome Lederer, director of the Civil Aeronautics Board’s safety bureau, was at the scene of the crash within hours.

The director reported that the aircraft had “struck the ground at a sharp angle on its nose and ricocheted about 100 feet, breaking up as it turned over.”

Throughout the long night, the ghastly job of removing the victims from the wreckage went on. A caravan of ambulances and hearses carried the dead to nearby Leesburg, where a cemetery chapel had been converted into a temporary morgue.

The tragedy stunned many people in Washington. Among the dead were U.S. Sen. Ernest Lundeen from Minnesota and a number of other government workers, including FBI agents and IRS workers.

A clamor went up from politicians wanting to know who or what caused the disaster to happen. Nevada Sen. Patrick McCarran told newsmen in Washington that “the crash resulted from inefficiency and chaos in the Civil Aeronautics Board.”

In fact, pinning down the exact cause of the disaster proved impossible. It would be 14 more years before David Warren would invent the flight data recorder, which would become invaluable in determining causes of air crashes.

In 1940 investigators had to rely on intuition, experience, eyewitness testimony and clues found in the wreckage to help them figure out why an airplane had gone down. In the case of the Lovettsville crash, it was determined that the DC-3 had been flying through a thunderstorm.

The fastened seatbelts provided strong evidence that the aircraft had been experiencing heavy turbulence just before it went down.

It also was determined that the airplane had nosed over just before heading almost straight down into the ground.

When the investigation was complete, two scenarios were provided for the most likely cause of the crash. Wind shear, a sudden and powerful change in the direction of the wind, was given as one probable cause.

The Civil Aeronautics Board had the last word in the matter, and it came up with a different theory. Its experts thought it was most likely that a bolt of nearby lightning had disabled the pilots.

One ray of light in the disaster was that the DC-3 hadn’t been filled to capacity. If it had been fully loaded, 32 people would have likely been killed.

As flying became an increasingly popular means of travel, the size of airplanes increased dramatically. The downside of this was that when the rare crash did occur, the number of fatalities was often shocking.

The worst accident in aviation history happened on March 27, 1977, when two airlines collided on a runway on the Spanish island of Tenerife.

There were 61 survivors, but 583 people perished in the fiery crash.

Such numbing losses in a single aviation accident still were unimaginable in 1940. The worst airline accident that had occurred prior to the Lovettsville crash was on March 26, 1939, in Oklahoma City.

Eight people had been killed in that crash, which resulted from an engine exploding just after takeoff. More than doubling the previous record for fatalities made the Lovettsville disaster front-page news throughout the country.

The fact that Mrs. Hale had friends and relatives living in the Charlottesville area brought the national tragedy even closer to home.