Unscheduled Death

The Puerto Ricans sat stolidly on the cramped bucket seats as the potbellied plane rolled down the San Juan strip and took off into the twilight. There were 62 of them, crowded into a converted C46 Curtiss Commando, on the way to the mainland for seasonal work on sugar beet farms in Michigan. Three and a half hours out, an engine sputtered and died. At 10:06 p.m. Pilot Joseph Halsey radioed laconically: "It looks as if I'm going into the drink." Steward Hector Medina, a Puerto Rican, tried hastily to explain about the life jackets and rafts to the panic-stricken passengers as they cried out their prayers. Then the plane slid along the dark sea, stopped, began to settle.

At dawn, a searching Coast Guard plane spotted eight rafts tied together in a column and bobbing on the choppy sea. Two hours later, a U.S. destroyer escort had picked up 34 passengers and the three members of the plane's crew. Later they sighted another Puerto Rican, named Pedro Guzman, clinging to a nearly deflated raft. As he started to swim to the ship, he suddenly doubled up and went under. When he came up, blood gushed from his shoulder: a shark had ripped his arm down to the elbow. As two bluejackets with rifles tried to hold off the charging shark, another sailor scrambled over the side, passed a line around Guzman, and hauled him out of the bloodstained water. His shoulder was slashed to the bone and four triangular chunks had been bitten out of his back. Twenty minutes later Guzman was dead. In the choppy sea, 27 other Puerto Ricans had drowned.

To Puerto Ricans such crashes had become a deadly familiar story. A year before, 53 had died when a crowded C46 operated by Strato-Freight Inc. plunged into the ocean after an engine failure near San Juan. Six months before that, a chartered plane of Airborne Transport Inc., carrying 29 Puerto Ricans, had disappeared between San Juan and Miami.

As long ago as last fall, the Civil Aeronautics Administration had charged that Westair Transport--a small Seattle outfit which owned the C46 in last week's crash--had been "guilty over a long period of time of ... careless and reckless operation of aircraft," asked the CAB to revoke its operating certificate. The CAA cited instance after instance of Westair planes flying overloaded, with broken de-icing equipment, with cargo blocking exits, with fogged cockpit windshields, with inadequate fire-extinguishing equipment, without an operating radio, without safety belts. Two months ago the CAB, a deliberate body, began hearings. It was still pondering last week when the Commando hit the sea. The crash was expected to help it reach a decision.

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