The Nome Nugget

Sixty - Five Feared Dead In Crash Of Airliner Into New York's East River

NEW YORK, (P) - A glistening new turboprop American Airlines plane with 73 persons aboard, plunged into the chilling, fog-covered waters of the East River with a shattering crash late Tuesday night. Sixty-five apparently perished, despite rescue efforts by harbor craft.

The plane's pilot, using instruments because of the murky weather conditions, was feeling his way toward a runway at LaGuardia Airport on a nonstop flight from Chicago.

But for some undetermined reason, the big four-engine turbo-prop craft smashed into the water and burst apart half a mile from the shore end of the runway.

Some of the passengers and crew were flung from, or floated out of, the wreckage before it sank to the river bottom 30 to 36 feet below.

A tugboat chugging along a few hundred feet away cut loose two barges it was towing here from Connecticut and raced to the crash site. Crewmen leaped into the water or used boat hooks to pull out the eight persons known to have survived. One was an 8-year-old boy.

All through the night and into a doleful gray, rainy dawn, a huge array of boats searched the river for bodies. By midmorning only 19 had been recovered, leaving 46 still missing.

Swirling river currents plus rain and wind up to 40 miles an hour, hampered the search for other bodies, and gave rise to fears that some of them might be swept miles out into Long Island Sound.

The site of the crash was marked by a few floating pieces of the $1,700,000 Lockheed Electra airliner a type put into service only a few weeks ago.

Among the missing plane passengers presumed dead was Beulah Zachary, producer of the Kukla, Fran and Ollie television program.

The new airliners were designed to combine jet power with the advantage of the propeller. The engines operate on the turbine principle.