The Mysterious Fifties: A Technical But Also Historiographically Cranky Appendix to Postblogging Technology, July 1956

 So I thought I might write about exotic rocket fuels today to celebrate whatever SpaceX is or isn't doing yesterday, but then American commercial aviation decided to be the one to not to do anything yesterday. Besides, it turns out that the fluorine fuels --and who am I to turn down free clicks by talking about fluorine chemistry?-- were to go into the Dyno-Saur, which definitely deserves one or several Technical Appendixes when the time grows nearer. So I wrote about something else! Something also relevant! Air traffic control! How exciting.

If you are not a Canadian, (and why should you be?), it is probably hard to credit just how important the Avro Arrow is to our national psyche. John Diefenbaker, the Prime Minister who cancelled it, was the first "Prairie populist" to reach the PMO and is himself a bit of an unhealed wound in our national soul. This isn't a post about that. It's the introduction of a post about something else. (The Grand Canyon Mid-air collision, if you're too impatient to wait for the jump.) It is not inspired by the excellent Wikipedia article about the CF-105, from which this beautiful picture comes, but rather the accompanying article about the Orenda Iroquois engine that was to power it. That article is weirdly wrong, setting out a strange and counter-factual popular history in which the Iroquois engine was developed in secrecy and perhaps only adopted for the Arrow after the Rolls-Royce RB. 106 was cancelled, and whatever happened to the Wright J67, happened. Like the notion that Sputnik was a surprise, or that the Eisenhower Administration was functional, it belongs in a weird, alternate Fifties history, the kind that the Wright conglomerate would have written if it had decided to fail at literature instead of business. Both articles cite the same source, and it is certainly possible that the RB. 106 was favoured over the Iroquois at some point in development, but to say that the Iroquois was some kind of secret is just wrong. 

"In 1954, the RB.106 program was cancelled, necessitating the use of the backup Wright J67 engine instead. In 1955, this engine was also cancelled, leaving the design with no engine. At this point, the Pratt & Whitney J75 was selected for the initial test-flight models, while the new TR 13 engine was developed at Orenda for the production Mk. 2s.^[45]"

What do you even do with this? The J67 was just a licensed version of the Bristol Olympus! The Grand Canyon crash has not been obfuscated, but maybe it helps us understand the causes of obfuscation. In any case, it sure is relevant the day after the first national U.S. commercial air flight stop in 23 years. (NPR link to minimise the risk of link rot, in case the reader of five years has had it driven out by all the good news and happy occasions since.) 

Forty-five minutes?? I guess it's short for a Let's Play. So. On 30 June 1956, TWA Flight 2 (a Lockheed L-1049A Super Constellation) was struck by United Air Lines Flight 718 (Douglas DC-7) over Grand Canyon National Park. The remains fell in inaccessible areas and took a lot of recovery, as did the families of the 128 people killed, all crew and passengers of both planes. It was the first airline accident to exceed 100 casualties, but since it involved two planes, Don Bennett's crown is unclaimed. 

It's something of a truism that air accidents do not normally happen in mid-air halfway through a journey, and, given that the sky is big and that planes are small, they do not usually involve collisions --as opposed to accidents near airports. The two planes were on close tracks, having both taken off from LA within three minutes of each other, heading for Kansas City and Chicago, destinations close enough that their respective tracks would not have diverged by that much had they made independent headings, but of course they didn't, because the Grand Canyon was roughly on both routes, and why not do some sightseeing on the way?

To get it out of the way, sightseeing is not the problem here. The problem is planes getting too close to each other. Both aircraft were in uncontrolled airspace, which probably raises the air traveller's eyebrows, since what else is air traffic control for, but control? That being said, there was no way for LAX to control them, since they had long since flown off radar screens, and there was in 1956 no network of localiser receivers or transponders aboard aircraft capable of cooperating with localisers to give distance and bearing. Instead, airliners flying close to each other were given altitude bands to fly in, and "VFR rules" were in effect. In other words, air crew were supposed to look where they were going.

The photograph of Correlli Barnett that the Daily Telegraph chose to run
with his obituary does tell a story, doesn't it?

As it turns out, it was hard to look where you were going while flying through weather, or perhaps while flying over the Grand Canyon and getting a look-see, so three minutes after takeoff, Captain Gandy of Super Constellation Star of the Seine requested, via the TWA flight despatcher that he be allowed to fly at 21,000ft, over the weather. The flight despatcher then asked ATC, because that is the way things were done in those days, for permission. It was, sensibly, refused, since Gandy was about to enter Las Vegas airspace, and all Las Vegas ATC had to go on  was TWA Flight 2's planned track. So instead Gandy asked for "1000ft on top," which is to say, 1000ft above weather in VFR conditions. This was granted, so Gandy was flying in VFR, while Captain Robert Shirley of DC7 Dayliner Vancouver (hometown represent!) was under IFR in his assigned 21,000ft band,  presumably flying safely (as regards danger from collision, anyway) in the weather. Unfortunately, as far as Gandy was concerned, a thousand feet "above the weather" essentially meant 21,000ft. The whole point of thousand feet bands was that airliner altimeters weren't accurate enough to do better at this altitude. Something to bear in mind the next time an argument about what was and was not possible for military air navigation in WWII breaks out! As far as it goes, Gandy was supposed to be looking out, while Shirley had no idea that he had anything to look out for, and it was Shirley who hit Gandy, although Shirley spotted Gandy at the last minute. 

The rage with which the public met this disaster in particular has a great deal to do with the revelation that commercial aviation was just so sloppy. This wasn't some dodgy nonsked with a useless pilot or ground crew who couldn't measure gas. This was TWA and United flying brand-new planes. The Air Traffic Controller was remiss in not establishing that both captains were aware of each other's proximity, but he was under no procedural or legal obligation to do so, and, to put it more strongly, this was not the way things were done. 

I will say that the DC7 stinks. A bad bet commercially for Douglas, the underlying story is that it was meant to fly a transcontinental service competitive with the Comet and head off De Havilland inroads into American commercial aviation, which, as it turns out, no worries mate, as it turns out that the American builders who refused to build a competitor to the Comet 2 were perfectly correct to judge it to be an impossible job. All the same, and sightseeing opportunities aside, finagling a 21,000ft flying band would have greatly helped Captain Gandy make the printed schedule at a time when the airlines were on the back foot, and faced with the impossible task of explaining how lying about their scheduled flight times was actually good commercial practice, and United was faced with the task of "babying" their Wright Duplex Cyclones to keep the unreliable turbocompound jobs working. None of this could be spelled out in spite of the public's inchoate rage, although give Robert Hotz credit where credit is due for being very publicly ashamed of his industry. 

The Super Constellation was also of dubious commercial value, which is how Lockheed came to drop out of the airliner business, but overall a much more successful and long lasting plane than the DC7, and Captain Shirley overall at much less fault than Gandy. As we will see in the unfolding of this story, it is the beleaguered CAA that fell first and hardest, being replaced by the FAA in 1958 after yet another accident involving the usual suspects. (An F-100 ramming another DC7 flying "on weather" over Las Vegas, in 1958. You get in the way of a Super Sabre, you deserve what you get!) proved to be too much for those who wanted to keep commercial air under the Commerce Department. Exit the management of the Eisenhower CAA, still complaining about Sinclair Weeks, and why not? Remember in 2022 when it would have been hard to believe that this clown could be a Cabinet Secretary? Those were the days. Throttling the "Airways program" and shutting down the Air Navigation Board doesn't even get a mention in his Wiki. Or trying to shut down the Bureau of Standards, for that matter. It is a good thing they don't put clowns in charge of landing airliners nowadays!