The weather in Kansas City changed to a slow drizzle, but Wichita, the first of five stops on the way to Los Angeles, reported improving conditions, so by ten o’clock the sky there was clear, the ceiling unlimited, temperature thirty-nine, winds a mere ten miles an hour; but the skies at Emporia, the halfway point, were more unsettled, and, for some reason, the TWA weather report omitted the barometric pressure. Flying the Super-trimotor was Robert Fry, an experienced and skilled aviator, a veteran who became a member of the Caterpillar Club by once parachuting to safety from his falling plane three years earlier in China. He was thirty-two. The co-pilot, Jess Mathias, was two years younger and had far less experience, but then his job was mostly handling tickets, baggage, and mailbags. The plane carried sixty-three pounds of mail stored loosely behind and beneath the pilots, and there was a little less than two hundred pounds of baggage, and also some sporting equipment—tennis rackets, golf clubs, balls—belonging to John Happer. The six passengers, eight short of a full cabin, weighed about eleven hundred pounds, only a moderate load.
II
The plane: fifty feet long with a seventy-nine-foot wing and weighing six and a half tons, the Fokker 10A was a large machine for the time; competitors commonly copied its design (especially Ford Aviation, although its version was entirely of metal). The fuselage, slung beneath the one-piece wing, was welded steel tubing covered with treated fabric, a material something like oilcloth; running nearly the length of the wing was a main spruce-and-fir spar, three by two feet at its center, that supported wooden cantilevers; plywood skin covered the whole wing assembly, virtually all of it secured by glue (if you’ve ever built a model airplane out of balsa sticks and tissue paper, you have an idea of the construction of the Fokker). Two of the tripropeller Pratt-Whitney Wasp engines hung close inboard under the wings, and the third sat forward on the fuselage nose; behind was the ten-window cockpit with excellent visibility. On each side of the passenger cabin were a dozen large, square windows, and below hung two pneumatic, nonretractable wheels. Transcontinental planes were silver and red and carried a logo (remarkably similar to the emblem of the Lafayette Escadrille of the First World War) of an Indian in a warbonnet. The plane cruised at 120 miles an hour and had a good safety record. Only six months earlier the airline had begun coast-to-coast passenger service with F-10s flying a route laid out by Charles Lindbergh; the thirty-six-hour trip from New York to Los Angeles stopped overnight in Kansas City.
Anthony Fokker, designer and builder of the F-10 series, was a blond, blue-eyed Dutchman famous for building German warplanes featuring his synchronizing mechanism allowing a pilot to fire a nose-mounted machine gun directly through the propellers with lethal accuracy. (During the war, the Germans asked him to demonstrate the new weapon himself in actual combat, and he—a friend of Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron—went aloft, drew a bead on a French plane, but decided to let the generals do their own killing.) I have not found figures for how many Allied planes fell from the sky as a direct result of the Flying Dutchman’s genius. Two years before the beginning of commercial air transport in 1924 (the year the Four Horsemen rode over Army), Anthony Fokker moved to the United States and started building large commercial aircraft employing his favored design of single-high-wing planes made of composite materials. His success—and the competition from Ford Aviation—attracted General Motors into buying a controlling interest in his company.
III
That March morning, Fokker 99E flew the first hundred miles through broken overcast and mist, but things began to change near Emporia: the sky thickened and fog forced the plane to fly ever lower. Co-pilot Mathias called Wichita at ten-twenty-two and said, We’re flying right on the ground—there’s no ceiling—we’re going to head back to K.C. TWA control in Wichita reported skies there clear but for a few clouds northeast—in the direction of 99E—with visibility unlimited and only a slight wind. At about half past Mathias radioed, We’re going to try it again. If we can’t make it, we’ll go back to Olpe and land. The Olpe field was ten miles east of the Chase County line. At about this time, Paul Johnson, flying a slower mail plane that took off fifteen minutes behind the Fokker, hit the low fog and had to descend to just above the treetops; he headed off northwest where the weather seemed to be clearing, but, as he maneuvered up and down and around, he kept picking up ice that began to bow the ailerons with such weight he had to open the throttle all the way. Johnson saw the Fokker and thought it seemed to be following his climbs and drops and turns through the murk (he later spoke of gobs of weather); he was afraid to turn around with the other plane so close behind. Then he headed southwest. His radio and airspeed indicator iced up and he had to fly “blind,” using only his tachometer and turn and climb indicators, and the engine strained under the ice. Then, abruptly, he cleared the dirty gloom and flew into sunlight, but the Fokker was not behind him.
At ten-thirty-five, Mathias radioed the tower and received another report of fair weather. G. A. O’Reilly, the Wichita operator, asked, Do you think you’ll make it? There was no reply, and O’Reilly, getting tense, called again, Can you get through? Then came Mathias’ voice straining: Don’t know yet, don’t know yet! A minute later O’Reilly again radioed: Fokker Niner-Niner-Easy? No answer.
Near highway 13, about three miles southwest of Bazaar, Edward and Arthur Baker were moving cattle on the homeplace when they heard the distant motors of a plane heading southeast. The noise passed. A few minutes later it returned and seemed now to be moving northwest, this time spluttering and backfiring, but in the low overcast the Bakers could see nothing: a brief silence, a quiet above, then a loud, thudding crash. The cattle jumped and banged into the corral. Edward climbed up on a board fence to try to see better to the west; from almost above him a long silvery and red object dropped in the slow zigzag of a falling slip of paper. The young men grabbed the nearest horses and rode all-out toward where they had seen the silver thing float down behind a treeless ridge. About a mile away they came to it, a piece of aircraft wing—broken cleanly across but otherwise hardly damaged—lying topside up. On it was NC999E. A half mile west, in a broad basin on the low ridge lay an incredible tangle of something with a tall, silvery projection like a huge tombstone. They rode fast and came up to the Fokker, heaped past recognition but for the upside-down tail assembly. Gasoline fumes hung thickly, but there was no fire and there had been no explosion.
Edward got off and tied his horse to a fence, and Arthur rode around the wreckage that lay scattered over a hundred yards. They saw four bodies lying outside the plane, the farthest sixty feet away, and they could make out two more men still in the cabin. Although there was little blood, the victims were considerably mutilated and dismembered. Without question, all six passengers were dead. Edward started to pick up some strewn mail but stopped, and his brother rode back to the house, where his father had already called the operator in Bazaar. Sometime after eleven A.M., the Cottonwood ambulance, rolling at ninety-five miles an hour down wet and unpaved route 13, made a slow, fish tailing climb over the light covering of snow on the pasture. More countians arrived and helped pick up letters, gasoline-soaked mailbags (a Chicagoan later wrote Bazaar postmaster John Mitchell to ask for a 99E letter to add to his collection of crash mail), and large sums of cash, jewelry, and five watches. Others had the grisly task of gathering up bodies and pieces of men in bushel baskets and gunnysacks. When a part-time deputy arrived he became ill and hung back from the mangled mess until his stomach settled.
Wally Evans of Matfield didn’t want to take his Model A coupe into the muddy pastures, but when four big fellows lifted the wheels off the ground so he could put on chains, they all headed out. Later he said, The bodies was all in pieces. They’d be a shoe with a foot in it. Bodies was strung out—just a windrow of them to the southwest. The aluminum partition between the cabin and the front end where the pilot sat was laying level with the ground—the sign was still up there telling what the pilot’s name was.
By noon, news of
the crash had spread over the county, and sightseers rushed out, tearing into the muddy pasture. Then word came that one of the victims was Knute Rockne, and from then on, the crowd rolled in from a half-dozen counties: by early afternoon five planes had landed nearby, their pilots huddled and holding their leather helmets and guessing at the cause of the crash; one veteran of the World War said he’d never seen such mutilation on this side of the Atlantic. In the whine of stuck car wheels and the drone of circling planes, cowhands sat astride their horses and watched people from Wichita slog their Fords into the prairie and then get out and hurry toward the crash. They tore down the three barbed-wire fences, scrabbled in the rocky mud for keepsakes, milled about the wreckage, photographed each other standing and waving and smiling beside it as if it were the Washington Monument; they were picking up every loose thing, all the while getting in the way of men trying to gather up body parts. Stationed at the middle of the wreckage to protect it, the deputy sheriff (having recovered his stomach) was busy tearing out the Fokker’s radio for a memento; John Happer’s tennis rackets and golf balls were long gone. The only things people handed over were letters. One man said later, Rockne’s pocketbook was laying there just like you’d taken a corn knife on a stump and cut it right in two. There was a one dollar bill like that, just half of it, and I said, “Here’s where I’m going to get me a souvenir.” Years afterward, former state senator Wayne Rogler told of a fellow walking around with a passenger’s ear, and, when a friend admired it, he pulled out his knife and sliced it in half to share.
Authorities stopped a boy carrying away a carburetor and looked at it, told him he had a swell find, and let him go off with it. Then bigger things began disappearing: a man even rolled one of the huge flattened tires over the wet hills to Matfield. The eager crowd shredded the cabin fabric beyond what the crash had done and stuffed pieces into their pockets. Finally, like a great carcass scavenged by hyenas, only a skeletal plane remained: the broken frame, engines, tail assembly, the fallen wing. Harv Cox, who drove the speeding ambulance out and returned with Rockne’s body, said later, I’ve never seen people go so crazy in my life. When Cox died a half century later, he still had not returned to the site; he said, I got my fill of it that day.
After the passengers’ bodies were gathered up, searchers found the co-pilot under the forward bulkhead, but there was no sign of the captain. Somebody near Matfield claimed to have seen the plane pass overhead at about ten-thirty with a man on the wing, and a rumor arose that the pilot had abandoned his ship, but when a team of horses pulled out the seven-hundred-pound nose engine rammed three feet into the earth, under it lay Robert Fry upside down, still buckled in. Wayne Rogler said when they picked up the bodies they were just like jelly. Identification was difficult. Rockne’s quarterback of 1929, who lived in Wichita, drove up and, looking at the rubber leg wrappings on one victim, said they had to be the ones Rockne wore for phlebitis. There was such dismemberment that, when the embalmed remains of the eight men went off on the train, the Cottonwood undertakers weren’t entirely certain they had put all the parts with the right bodies.
By nightfall, the airline had finally posted guards at the wreckage, a good thing, since the next day word got out that H. J. Christen had withdrawn fifty-eight thousand dollars just before he left home and that he was also carrying half a million dollars in negotiable bonds. After searching, his wife found the money and securities, but to this day, a few countians believe someone on that muddy March morning carried off a briefcase with a fortune in it, money hidden yet in the Chase prairie. When the guards finally left the site, people went back in with shovels and dug the spot like starving men might a potato patch.
Rockne’s sons, eleven and fourteen years old, came to Cottonwood with Dr. D. M. Nigro, a Kansas City friend, who confirmed identification while the boys waited in the car on Broadway. They had only been told their father was hurt in an accident. Nigro came out of the furniture store—also the undertaker’s lab—sat between the boys in the back seat, put his arms around them, and explained what had really happened. The elder son, crying, vowed he would become a great quarterback.
On Wednesday, the day following the crash, there was a coroner’s inquest held in the courthouse. Of the five people who heard or saw the plane go down, one of them said it fell like a meteor. The witnesses agreed on virtually every detail of the last minutes of 99E, but only one person, a garageman and sometime deputy sheriff, testified to seeing ice at the site; perhaps having a more trained eye than a cowhand, the mechanic said the pieces were U-shaped and could have come from the leading edge of the wing. The sheriff testified the co-pilot’s automatic pistol had been jammed, apparently by the terrible impact, but no shells had been fired.
Airline and government officials offered little more than a recitation of the general procedures for a fatal air crash, perhaps something to be expected, especially when the county attorney said to Leonard Jurden, the federal supervising aeronautical inspector, If I should ask any question that the Department of Commerce does not want you to answer, just don’t answer. Government policy at the time was to keep information about airline crashes secret. TWA employees (including Jack Frye, the man who would soon write the first specifications for a modern airliner) added little, their coolness perhaps abetted by the practice of requiring passengers to sign their tickets and release the company from liability. The inquest established only that the plane was flying northwest just before the wing broke off and that 99E came down in a long curve marked out by wing debris and mail sacks, and the conclusion says simply eight men met their deaths as the result of an airplane fall; cause undetermined. The headline the next day in the New York Times: UNABLE TO FATHOM ROCKNE PLANE CRASH.
On Thursday, Anthony Fokker flew to the crash scene and landed close by to examine what remained of the eighty-thousand-dollar aircraft. Under pressure because of the sensational aspect of the disaster, the federal Aeronautics Branch in Washington broke its policy of secrecy on fatal crashes and issued a hurried statement saying the missing left propeller suggested that a piece of ice from the prop hub somehow broke the blade and created stress great enough to fracture the wing. Although Fokker discounted that explanation, he searched for the missing prop by dynamiting in the cavity left by the port engine. It so happened he had personally inspected 99E the day before the accident and he rejected all implications of improper wing design or structural flaw. Of three hundred Fokker monowings built, he said not one had ever had a structural failure, and he concluded the pilot was insufficiently informed about the weather and had been forced to fly blind, a disorientation causing him to put the ship into a dangerous attitude he tried to correct with a precipitate and violent maneuver that snapped off the wing. Noting TWA rarely secured mailbags as it was required to, Fokker said weight abruptly shifting could have created problems, and he pointed out how the letters and mailbags had been strung out along the crash route. To the designer of 99E, the cause lay with the pilot, co-pilot, airline, and weather forecasters.
Thursday evening the sheriff (who had earlier let seven prisoners see the wreck and help pick up debris) recovered the missing propeller in Cottonwood from a boy who had pulled it off the salvage truck. (The few remnants went to Wichita and some weeks later sold as scrap for less than a hundred dollars.)
IV
The inadequacy of governmental attempts to find the cause was obvious, and, at once, letters began reaching the Department of Commerce and appearing in papers; the accident was so sensational the New York Times made it front-page news and in December called it the year’s big story. Although 99E was hardly the first airliner to crash—the prior twelve months had seen six major accidents in the country, one taking sixteen lives and another thirteen—it was the first American disaster to kill someone as famous as Rockne. One New Yorker wrote to the Times: If government or private inquiry shows that the airline was negligent, what penalty can the government inflict on the airline? Newspapers, however, spent no time looking into either possi
ble causes or the secret investigation; instead they fed the public sentimentally lionizing articles about the death of a Viking and pumped up peculiar details: the story about Rockne getting out of a taxi in Chicago the day before the crash and a friend saying, Soft landings, coach! and Rockne responding, You mean happy landings. And the one about why Rockne, the man who put the football in the air, no longer used the railroad: he said, What’s the use of wasting time on trains and automobiles? This is a fast day and age. I’ve got to get around to do things and reach places. But the news stories, as irrelevant as they were, kept the accident before the public as much as good investigative reporting would have, and pressures on airlines and government remained strong enough that, years later, a cynical—if not cruel—Kansas Citian wrote, The outfall of Rockne’s death atoned for his hustle of collegiate football. What happened to aircraft design and regulations after the plummet of 99E would have happened sooner or later anyway, but the changes came about earlier because of a famous coach going down near Bazaar, Kansas.
The initial result was unprecedented: the grounding of all F-10 airliners. The director of the Aeronautics Branch claimed he had been planning to ground the planes on April the first anyway (he said, We missed the boat by one day), but he still waited five weeks after the crash actually to do it. Less than two months later he cleared them to fly again, and a few did, but confidence in the plane was gone: TWA even pulled the engines from some of its F-10s and torched the bodies. Fokker Aircraft was finished in America, and General Motors took over and changed the name to General Aviation before leaving the business altogether a few years later, as did Ford. The demand for all-metal aircraft was national and insistent: two years after the crash the first of the DC series of airliners, some of the most reliable big planes ever made, appeared. Because the internal structure of an F-10 wing could be examined only by tearing off the sheathing, new designs for all commercial planes permitted much easier inspection. The government abandoned its policy of secret crash inquiries and records, and it received authority to investigate air accidents, hold formal hearings, subpoena witnesses, and require testimony; the unofficial removal of even the smallest fragment of a wrecked aircraft became a federal crime; and, by the next winter, commercial planes carried a de-icing substance. In fact, a couple of years after the Rock fell, the only defeated proposal to improve airline safety was a law requiring a parachute for every passenger.
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