Air accident of the KLM near Copenhagen 1947

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Air accident of the KLM near Copenhagen 1947
Douglas C-47A PH-TBP KLM ed Ringway 05/20/47 edited-2.jpg

An identical DC-3 in the KLM color scheme of the time
Accident Summary
accident type Stalled at takeoff due to a maintenance error
location Kastrup Airport , Copenhagen , Denmark
date January 26, 1947, 3:35 p.m
fatalities 22
survivor 0
aircraft
aircraft type Douglas DC-3C (C-47A-30-DK)
operator KLM Royal Dutch Airlines
Mark PH TCR
departure airport Amsterdam , Netherlands
stopover Copenhagen , Denmark
destination airport Stockholm , Sweden
passengers 16
crew 6
Lists of aircraft accidents

The KLM accident near Copenhagen in 1947 occurred with a Douglas DC-3C (C-47) of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines on January 26, 1947. The scheduled airliner from Amsterdam with the destination Stockholm/Bromma crashed shortly after take-off from the Kastrup landing site ( Copenhagen ) off. All 22 occupants were killed. The cause of the crash was a stall during climb , which was triggered by a maintenance error on the elevator of the machine.

Among the 16 passengers were the Swedish Prince Gustav Adolf and the US opera singer and actress Grace Moore . To date, it is the fourth worst accident in Danish aviation history. At the same time, the crash had an immediate impact on the line of succession to the Swedish throne . Because of its scope, the incident was perceived as an extraordinary tragedy and was also called Flykatastrofen i Kastrup in the Danish press .  

aircraft type

Douglas DC-3

The aircraft used was a Douglas DC-3C (C-47A-30-DK). The twin-engine machine, used on short and medium-haul routes, was the most built and dominant American aircraft type of the 1930s to 1950s. After the Second World War , the DC-3, which was often used for military purposes, formed the basis of many post-war airlines and was flown in some cases for decades. At the Dutch airline KLM, the last DC-3 was only decommissioned in 1965.

The accident machine ( license plate : PH-TCR) was built in 1943 by the Douglas Aircraft Company (factory number: 43-48218). After being used by the United States Army Air Forces during World War II, it became the property of the airline KLM on June 4, 1946. The transfer to the home airport Amsterdam-Schiphol was carried out by the Dutch aircraft manufacturer Fokker , who overhauled the aircraft including the cabin furnishings. KLM also had the engines and propellers overhauled. Since then, the machine has had two Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp T-1830 engines with an output of 1,200 hp each . The maximum cruising speed of the machine was 285 km/h, its maximum range was 1,800 km. The left engine (serial number: CP-360458) had been in operation for more than 1,100 flight hours before the last flight, the right one (CP-359447) almost 1,300 flight hours.

The PH-TCR was accepted by the Dutch Reich Aviation Service on October 18, 1946 during a test flight. Three days later, the machine was approved for flight operations and entered in the Dutch aviation register with the number 490. The approval was valid until October 21, 1947. The aircraft could carry a maximum of 21 passengers. The maximum take-off weight was 12,712 kg and the maximum landing weight was 11,800 kg. The DC-3 had flown around 1686.5 flight hours before it crashed, including 442 flight hours after handover by Fokker and around 35.5 flight hours since the last inspection.

In contrast to its sister aircraft PH-TBV, which crashed in 1946, the DC-3 was provided with the current KLM color scheme. This provided for a blue-painted nose, from which a blue, tapered side stripe stretched under the passenger windows to the stern. The underside of the fuselage was white, while the blue lettering The Flying Dutchman (Eng.: " The Flying Dutchman " ) was emblazoned on the upper side. The vertical stabilizer was red, white and blue according to the colors of the Dutch flag , with the KLM logo placed in the center of the white color field.

flight history

crew

Flight Captain Gerrit J. Geysendorffer in 1945

The crew of six on duty came from the Netherlands. The flight captain Gerrit Johannes Geysendorffer (* 1892) was a well-known aviation pioneer in his homeland and the first Dutchman with a commercial pilot's license. He was - with interruptions - from March 1, 1921 in the service of KLM. On behalf of the US publisher W. Van Lear Black from Baltimore , Geysendorffer had carried out the first flight to Batavia in the Dutch East Indies (today Jakarta , Indonesia ) in 1927 with a Fokker F.VIIa (registration: H-NADP) and was until 1930 his private pilot. Geysendorffer flew to the Dutch colony more than 50 times and was knighted for his services to the Order of Orange-Nassau (Ridder in de Orde van Oranje Nassau) . Geysendorffer had been authorized to fly the DC-3 since 1937. Between 1921 and 1940 he had completed 14,000 flight hours for the KLM on 31 different types. From November 1945 he had flown 1251 hours, 300 of them on the DC-3. The family man lived in Amsterdam and was married to the Danish woman Tofa Spandet, whom he met as a young pilot during an emergency landing in Denmark.

Co-pilot Gerrit Jan Rietman (* 1918) received his pilot's license in 1937 and successfully completed his co-pilot training in 1939. He had been in KLM service since November 1, 1940. The flight mechanic Willem Antonie van Bommel (* 1924) worked for the airline since 1945. The two radio operators Simon Martinus Antonius Pijnenburg (* 1915) and Willem Brandenburg (* 1920) as well as the flight attendant Hugo Hoek (* 1917) had been in the service of KLM since 1946.

Picked up passengers in Amsterdam and flight to Kastrup

Hereditary Prince Gustav Adolf at his wedding in 1932 to the German Sibylla of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha

The scheduled flight from Amsterdam to Stockholm on Sunday, January 26, 1947, with a scheduled stopover in Copenhagen, was operated daily by the Dutch airline KLM. The DC-3 (reference number: PH-TCR) took off from Schiphol Airport with its six crew members and seven passengers . Among the passengers who had boarded the machine in Amsterdam was Prince Gustav Adolf of Sweden , who was accompanied by his secretary, the count's adjutant and court huntsman Albert Gustav Hugo Stenbock (* 1899). The 40-year-old Hereditary Prince followed a private invitation from Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands to go wild boar hunting. He had spent a few days at Palais Soestdijk and was now on his way back to his family in Sweden.

Passengers from Kastrup

A KLM DC-3 in old paint scheme with the right passenger door open (1939)

The PH-TCR arrived at Kastrup Airport, which is located a few kilometers south of Copenhagen , at 14:58 local time . Three passengers left the DC-3 here while the engines were checked during a routine check. At 3:15 p.m., twelve other passengers boarded the KLM plane from the Vilhelm-Lauritzen terminal . In addition to the crew of six, there were 16 passengers on board for the last leg of the flight – eleven men, three women and two children. They came from six nations; seven from Denmark, four from Sweden, two from France and one from the United States. Two men from the Dutch colonies and Spain boarded with Prince Gustav Adolf and Count Stenbock in Amsterdam.

Tour group around Grace Moore

Grace Moore on the cover of an Argentine film magazine (1935)

Best known among the passengers who boarded at Kastrup was US opera singer and actress Grace Moore . The 48-year-old soprano had left the United States in July 1946 for a concert tour of Europe and for mandatory performances for American soldiers. The day before leaving for Stockholm, Moore had given an acclaimed concert in front of 4,000 spectators in Copenhagen's KB Hall and had sung Ciribiribin as the last song . The folk-tinged title had become her signature tune since her Oscar -nominated role in the musical film The Shining Goal (1934). Moore's tour of Scandinavia was to continue the next day with a concert in Stockholm and further performances in Sweden.

The American's European tour was marred by her husband Valentín Parera 's illness lasting several months . The Spanish actor, who had accompanied her on her concert tours in the past, stayed behind at their joint property in Mougins on the Côte d'Azur . Moore had been spending a lot of time with her husband in the south of France and due to his ill health canceled scheduled performances at New York's Metropolitan Opera in February 1947. A few hours before her departure, she sent her husband a telegram in which she missed his presence ("Am longing awfully already. Today I go to Stockholm. I cannot be without you all these months.") .

Moore was accompanied on her concert tour by the twelve-year-old French pianist Jean-Loup Peltier (according to other sources, "Jean Loup Peltier", "Jean Louis Peltier" or "Louis Peltier"). Peltier was considered a highly talented musician and had already won first prize at the Paris Conservatoire . Also on Moore's staff were 41-year-old French impresario Roland Fernand Xavier Victor Malbecq (also known as "Roland Fernand Malbec", "Roland Ferdinant Vickard Malbec" or "Malbeq") and 24-year-old Dane Hans Henning Thomsen (also known as " HH Thomsen" and erroneously listed as "Hans Denning Thomsen"), who organized Moore's Scandinavian tour.

Gerda Neumann and other passengers

Passenger
and crew nationalities
Denmark Denmark 7
Netherlands Netherlands 7
Sweden Sweden 4
France France 2
Spain Spain 1
United States United States 1
total 22

The group around Moore to Stockholm was joined by the 31-year-old Danish singer Gerda Neumann and her husband, the Danish film producer Jens Dennow Thomasen (also known as "Jens Thomasen Dennow"). Neumann's husband was Thomsen's business partner and the couple had eaten with Moore the day before after the concert in the KB Hall. The American then invited Neumann to accompany her to Stockholm. From the late 1930s, the jazz -influenced popular Dane toured Europe and appeared in a number of films. Like Moore, she had also performed in front of British and US soldiers in Germany . The departure of Moore, Neumann and her husband was covered by the press and all three made themselves available for journalists' questions and photos before boarding the plane.

Neumann took her three to four-year-old nephew, who had Swedish citizenship, with him on the trip to Stockholm. Other Danish passengers included an engineer working in Sweden, another engineer and a broker employed by the airline Det Danske Luftfartselskab (DDL; later SAS ), and one male and one female passenger. A male passenger with Swedish nationality also boarded in Kastrup.

launch and crash

The PH-TCR accident route (this map does not correspond to the exact flight route)

At 1525 hrs the crew led by Flight Captain Geysendorffer began preparations for take-off. The two engines were warmed up and the air traffic controller on duty in the control tower gave the take-off clearance information twice. The crew acknowledged receipt of the clearance and taxied via runway 17 to the south-west end of runway 04. At 15:31 hrs the KLM aircraft began to take off. The sun was shining and there was light snowfall on the afternoon of this last Sunday in January 47. The outside temperature was −5 degrees Celsius. The wind came from a north-north-east direction. The wind speed was 40 km/h. Due to the strong headwind, the machine took off after only 200 to 300 meters from the ground, but this was considered normal.

During the climb, the PH-TCR showed a higher inclination than usual, more than 45 degrees according to eyewitness reports. At an altitude of 75 to 100 meters above the ground, the DC-3 rolled to the left and fell almost vertically. About one kilometer west of its take-off point, the PH-TCR hit the airfield nose and left wing first at 15:35. The crash site was right in the middle of the then smaller airport area, right at the intersection of runways 04-22 and 12-30. A severe fire broke out immediately after impact and quickly spread throughout the wreckage.

Even before the PH-TCR hit the ground, an airport employee who had observed the scene raised an alarm. The first rescue workers – airport employees with handheld fire extinguishers and a vehicle from the airport fire brigade – arrived at the scene of the accident within three minutes. Contrary to the instructions of the airport management, they did not rush to the scene of the accident via the paved paths, but directly over the frozen grass, but were unable to get to the occupants due to the heavy fire and the intense heat. Attempts to telephone the nearby fire station in Tårnby for reinforcements initially failed. The switchboard on the first floor of the airport building was unmanned at the time of the crash - the operator had left her seat for 15 minutes to make coffee.

A connection to the telephone exchange in Copenhagen only came about after a delay of more than ten minutes. A municipal fire department from Dragør arrived at the scene of the accident after about 20 minutes - the firefighters had seen smoke rising from the airport. They were followed by the Tårnby fire department, Falck A/S and the police. Only after more than an hour (according to other sources 30 minutes) did the rescue workers get directly to the wreck. There were no survivors.

All 22 occupants of the DC-3 were killed in the crash, the Copenhagen forensic inquest found - passengers and crew were found buckled in their seats. Identifying the dead proved difficult as they were burned beyond recognition. Prince Gustav Adolf was the first to be identified by carrying a metal identification disk, which soldiers normally wore, and a half-burned handkerchief with his initials. Grace Moore's body was identified by an engraved bracelet ("To Grace from Val") that she received as a gift from her husband after a concert in the United States. The jewels that the American had carried with her on her journey were recovered from the wreck. The body of Gerda Neumann, which the police initially mistakenly attributed to Moore, was identified by a brooch in the shape of a lyre . Just one day after the accident, 13 of the 22 bodies were identified.

Immediate consequences and funeral ceremonies

The Swedish throne (1947)
Coat of arms of Sweden

The plane crash attracted worldwide media attention due to the prominent fatalities. In addition to Danish, Swedish and Dutch daily newspapers, many English-language media also reported the accident on their front pages, including the New York Times , the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post .

The Swedish ambassador in Copenhagen was one of the first to learn of Prince Gustav Adolf's death. He then notified the deceased's younger siblings, Crown Princess Ingrid and Sigvard Bernadotte , who lived in Copenhagen . Princess Sibylla , Gustav Adolf's widow, had the news personally brought to Haga Castle by Crown Princess Louise of Sweden . Out of sympathy for the Swedish royal family and for Crown Princess Ingrid, mourning flags were ordered all over Copenhagen on January 27th . The standard of King Christian X of Denmark was also lowered to half-staff.

At his death, Prince Gustav Adolf was second in line to the Swedish throne, behind his father Gustav VI. Adolf , who was to succeed the late Gustav V to the throne in 1950 - three years after the accident . According to the law of succession at the time, according to which the Swedish royal dignity could only be inherited by male descendants, Carl Gustaf , who was almost nine months old at the time of the crash, became the new hereditary prince, after his 64-year-old grandfather. Carl Gustaf was the only son of the prince who died in the accident and Princess Sibylla. A later regency due to minors did not seem to be out of the question, in view of the infant prince Carl Gustaf and the advanced age of both the king and the crown prince. However, this situation did not arise. At the accession of Gustav VI. Adolfs, Carl Gustaf became crown prince of Sweden at the age of four and a half and became king when he was of age after his death in 1973.

In Copenhagen, Gustav Adolf's body was laid out in the Church of Sweden in a closed coffin bearing the Swedish flag . The Danish Royal Guard, Queen Alexandrine and the Danish Royal Family, Prime Minister Knud Kristensen and Foreign Minister Gustav Rasmussen attended the funeral ceremonies there. The Dutch envoy in Stockholm sent condolences to the family of the deceased in Drottningholm .

The Swedish royal court ordered an official mourning from January 28. All Stockholm theatres, including the Royal Dramatic Theatre , stopped playing. Gustav Adolf's body was brought home on the Swedish warship Oscar II and buried on February 4 in the Haga Royal Cemetery , not far from his home. The funeral ceremonies in Stockholm were attended by members of the royal families of Sweden, Denmark and Norway, the German Friedrich Josias Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and representatives from 35 countries.

Grace Moore's body was personally transported by her husband to Paris for a memorial service. On February 3, 500 people bid farewell to the singer and actress in the American Cathedral Church , including the US Ambassador Jefferson Caffery, the theater director Georges Hirsch , Henry Malherbe, director of the Opéra-Comique , the French tenor José Luccioni and the actresses Marlene Dietrich and Yvonne Printemps . Moore's body was transported via Cherbourg to New York on the America , where the passenger ship arrived on February 21. Two days later, Moore was buried in her hometown of Chattanooga , Tennessee , with great sympathy.

The majority of the other occupants of the crashed machine were buried in their home towns on February 4th and 5th.

Accident investigation and result

Loading at the start of the PH-TCR in Kastrup
curb weight 8269 kg
Crew (6) 480kg
galley equipment 90kg
Gasoline (2000L) 1440kg
oil (140 l) 126kg
passengers (16) 1240kg
baggage 250kg
post 82kg
cargo 212kg
Total weight
(max. take-off weight: 12,712 kg) 		12,189kg

The Danish State Aviation Inspectorate, assisted by experts from the Netherlands and Sweden, was entrusted with the official investigation into the plane crash. The commission of inquiry would later submit its report to the Dutch government.

Shortly after the accident, lead investigator Sven Aage Dalbro announced that no pilot with Geysendorffer's training and experience would have carried out such a launch on purpose. Geysendorffer had a total of 26,000 hours of flight experience. KLM said the 54-year-old pilot had been checked for health and found fit to fly.

Theory 1: Incorrect loading

Just one day after the crash, two possible theories were considered as triggers for the disaster. Initial reports assumed that the DC-3 was incorrectly loaded or overloaded. The maximum take-off weight of the PH-TCR was 12,712 kg. In addition to the six crew members and 16 passengers, the plane also carried 250 kg of luggage, 82 kg of mail and 212 kg of cargo on its last flight. At the start in Kastrup, the total weight of 12,189 kg was 523 kg below the maximum permissible take-off weight. Nevertheless, the Danish authorities lowered the maximum take-off weight for DC-3 aircraft in their airspace to 11,450 kg. Sweden followed this example. The British Minister for Civil Aviation, Lord Nathan , pointed out that the take-off weight of the accident machine was not excessive and would have been up to 13,600 kg in wartime. The American Air Force pointed out that during World War II their machines weighed up to 16,500 kg. The American-European regulations for air traffic provided for a maximum weight of 16,154 kg for the aircraft type.

Theory 2: Locked Elevator

A second theory assumed that the elevator lock had been forgotten to be released before takeoff. When the wind was strong, as was the case on the day of the accident, the elevator was fixed with a metal wedge to prevent uncontrolled swinging out on the ground and the resulting damage. Gunnar Larsson, deputy inspector at the Swedish civil aviation authority, stated that the rudder had a little room for movement despite the locking. This may have led the pilots, when testing the controls, to believe that the latch had already been released. At the time of the crash there was a strong wind, which also made it difficult to operate the rudder.

Usually these latches were also visually marked with flags or pennants so that ground staff or flight crew were careful to release them before takeoff. In fact, 15 minutes after the accident, one such metal wedge was found by a ground crew member about 76 meters east of the wreckage of the plane. The item showed no sign of burn marks, nor was it covered with snow. No such bar was found in the wreckage of the PH-TCR. The investigators were also unable to find any technical defects on the aircraft, particularly in the connections between the elevator and rudder. The find was made public just one day after the accident and the investigation commission announced that it would pay special attention to this point.

On the day of the accident, a 19-year-old mechanic from DDL was responsible for handling the KLM machine. He had only been a member of the ground staff at Kastrup Airport since January 7, 1947 and had only insufficient knowledge of the elevator lock on the DC-3. Also, no other employee was present who could have checked the mechanic's work for correctness. Since the bar had been bought new, it did not have any visual characteristics such as flags or pennants. After the crash, the mechanic protested his innocence and stated that the lock on the PH-TCR was not active. He was supported in his statement by the chief mechanic of the ground staff, who was absent on the day of the accident.

The mechanic's statements were contradicted by a witness who was about 75 meters away from the terminal on the second floor of the airport administration building when the aircraft was being serviced. He testified that five to eight minutes before takeoff, a man in a KLM uniform exited the PH-TCR and installed the latch. In order to test the behavior of the aircraft when climbing with the elevator locked, flights were carried out on February 1, 1947 with an identically constructed DC-3 operated by the airline DDL. Using sandbags, the test aircraft was as heavy as the crashed aircraft. They also carried the same amount of fuel. On board were flight captain Emil Dam, head of DDL's technical department, a member of the Danish-Swedish-Dutch investigation commission and three other pilots. The test flights were carried out from a flight altitude of 2000 meters. Climbs of about 20 meters were simulated with the elevator locked, during which the machine reached a high bank angle of up to about 60 degrees. Within seven seconds, the stall occurred and the DDL machine went into a spin .

examination result

The investigative commission came to the conclusion that the locking of the elevator was the cause of the accident. Already on January 31, five days after the plane crash, the Dutch state aviation authority published this in consultation with the Danish experts. The excessive bank angle at take -off caused the PH -TCR to stall, resulting in the crash. According to investigators, the metal bolt probably fell in the air or was thrown away by the explosion.

In addition to the mistakes made by the ground staff, the investigation report criticized the conduct of the flight crew around Captain Geysendorffer, whose good reputation was referred to. The pilots also failed to check the elevator lock as required by the checklist . The report indicated that the order of the checklist might be changed to include removing the lock before starting the engines. The Dutch daily newspaper Algemeen Dagblad , in an article published on February 1, 1947, attempted to explain the crew's negligence psychologically. The KLM machine arrived in Kastrup half an hour late because of the strong wind. Due to the prominent passengers, the crew would have felt the urge to initiate the onward flight to Stockholm as soon as possible.

Even before the crash in Kastrup, there had been two near misses involving DC-3 aircraft with locked elevators. One incident involved a Swedish aircraft in July/August 1946 at Schiphol Airport. Another recent case involved a KLM machine at Kastrup Airport. A Danish policeman had noticed the activated lock and a KLM employee had driven his car behind the machine taxiing to the start. Both incidents were never reported.

aftermath

The accident resulted in a steel cable being stretched on the ground between the DC-3's elevator and rudder so that a similar accident could not happen again.

The crash of the PH-TCR was the second of three serious accidents involving a DC-3 in Europe within a few days. A day before the disaster in Kastrup, a Spencer Airways passenger plane (registration number: VP-YFD) on a flight to Rome-Ciampino crashed under similar conditions shortly after take-off from London-Croydon , killing 12 of the 23 occupants. On February 1, an Air France DC-3 (F-BAXQ) from Bordeaux crashed when it collided with a peak of the Serra de Sintra mountain range under poor visibility conditions on final approach to Lisbon Airport . 15 of the 16 occupants were killed.

In early February 1947, the New York Times criticized that there had been confusion about who was responsible for the plane crash in Kastrup, since a US aircraft type owned by a Dutch airline had crashed on Danish soil. Similar problems arose a month earlier when a TWA - Lockheed Constellation (registration: N86505) crashed at Shannon Airport (Ireland). On February 3, 1947, at a meeting in Montreal , the Accident Investigation Division of the Provisional International Civil Aviation Organization recommended that the accident investigation should be between the nation whose plane crashed and the country where the accident occurred.

The Aviation Safety Network database ranks the 1947 crash as the worst aircraft accident in Denmark at the time, after an Air France DC-3 (F-BAOB) crashed near Køge en route from Copenhagen to Paris in 1946 , with the same number of inmates had died. The Kastrup air disaster is still the fourth worst accident in Danish aviation history. In 1957, all 23 occupants were killed when an Aeroflot Ilyushin Il-14 (CCCP-L1874) crashed into the southern harbor of Copenhagen. In 1971, an Ilyushin Il-18 of Hungarian Airline Malév (HA-MOC) crashed into the sea near the island of Saltholm on final approach to Copenhagen , killing 32 people. The worst aviation accident to date on Danish territory occurred on September 8, 1989, when a Convair CV-580 operated by the Norwegian charter airline Partnair crashed into the Skagerrak north of the municipality of Hirtshals off the Danish coast . None of the 55 occupants survived the accident (see Partnair Flight 394 ).

The mail and cargo recovered from the wreck of the PH-TCR is coveted by collectors. In May 2004 some pieces were sold at an auction in The Hague .

web links

Commons : Air disaster at Kastrup 1947  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

itemizations

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  2. ↑ Description of the Douglas DC-3 (C-47) at deutsches-museum.de, retrieved on April 24, 2011
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  4. ↑ a b c d Original Aeronautical Investigation Report, p. 6 at hdekker.info, Dutch, accessed 4 May 2011
  5. ↑ Grace Moore and Heir to Throne Die in Crash. In: Los Angeles Times , January 27, 1947, p. 2.
  6. ↑ Original Aviation Investigation Report, pp. 3-4 at hdekker.info, Dutch, accessed 24 April 2011
  7. ↑ Grace Moore dies in burning plane. In: The New York Times , January 27, 1947, p. 3
  8. ↑ Original Aviation Investigation Report, pp. 4-5 at hdekker.info, Dutch, accessed 24 April 2011
  9. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Swedish Prince Killed In Air Wreck Crash After Taking Off At Copenhagen, Miss Grace Moore Among 22 Victims. In: The Times , January 27, 1947, No. 50669, p. 4
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  25. ↑ Funeral Of Prince Gustaf Adolf : Ceremonies In Stockholm. In: The Times, February 5, 1947, No. 50677, p. 4.
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  32. ↑ Grace Moore and Heir to Throne dies in Crash. In: Los Angeles Times, January 27, 1947, p. 2
  33. ↑ a b Cause Of The Kastrup Air Crash: Elevator Lock Suspected. In: The Times , January 30, 1947, No. 50672, p. 3.
  34. ^ a b Carsten, Svend: Plane Load Limit Cut by 2 Nations. In: The New York Times, January 28, 1947, p. 3.
  35. ↑ a b Wedge Is Crash Clew. In: The Washington Post , January 28, 1947. p. 1.
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  42. ↑ AP : Crash Near Lisbon Kills 16: DC-3 From Paris Hits Peak. In: The New York Times, February 2, 1947, p. 1.
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