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University Daily Kansan Thursday. Jan. 5,196
Our Perilous Skyways
The weather was foul. A snowstorm wrapped the sprawling city in an impenetrable white veil, and closed in its airports.
ALL COMMERCIAL AIRCRAFT making the hazardous approaches to busy LaGuardia and Idlewild airports were under strict ground control. Their every move was monitored. They were held in strict landing patterns, insulated from each other by a cocoon of inviolable airspace three miles in diameter and 1,000 feet deep.
It was a stormy night—but with all aircraft under traffic control, nothing could go wrong.
Something did go wrong. Somewhere above New York Harbor, two planes collided. One, a TWA Constellation, was opened like a can of sardines. It fell on Staten Island. The other, a Douglas DC-8 operated by United Airlines, staggered on toward the heart of the city.
UAL took Gen. Elwood Quesada, who bosses the nations air traffic, to task for implying that that airline was responsible for the crash. While this bickering was going on, families of the slain were burying their loved ones—when there was enough left to bury—and air travelers everywhere decided to take the train this next trip. People began asking, "Why did it happen?" "Who's to blame?"
Mortally wounded, the ship fell into teeming Brooklyn, exploded, and set a whole block afire. In all, 136 persons, passengers and unfortunate on the ground, died in this greatest of all air tragedies.
IT HAPPENED BECAUSE there are physical limits to what men can do. It happened because the skyways of the nation and the airports they serve are about as adequate to handle the tremendous air traffic and advanced aircraft of today as a two-lane gravel road is adequate to handle 5 p.m. traffic in a large city.
The crash was probably due to a human error, made either by one of the pilots or by the harried ground controllers guiding both aircraft. Anyone who has been in the ground control center of a large airport can readily understand how such a tragedy could occur. Controllers must do scores of things simultaneously—scan their scopes, issue landing instructions, clear for takeoff, talk down planes in difficulty, monitor instruments. Saturation, that hazardous point when inflow exceeds the airports' ability to clear for landing, occurs often. Then planes must be "stacked," held in a fixed, circular flight pattern until it is their turn to land.
Pilots are no less subject to mistakes. The tremendous responsibility they hold in their hands, coupled with the considerable physical strain of long hours in the air, is conducive to error. Also, pilots not under ground control have the responsibility of taking evasive action if a collision with another aircraft threatens. Two jetliners on a collision course have less than 15 seconds to take evasive action—if they see each other within that time.
AND HERE IS a primary fault in our traffic control system. Planes operating under strict ground control are protected (theoretically) only from other planes operating under that system. Many military aircraft and other planes not under ground control are flying every day on the same airplanes as planes under control. This is extremely dangerous.
The only solution seems to be mandatory use of strict flight control over all planes at all times, coupled with the use of computers and other mechanical aids in ground control centers. If we do not ease the killing burden placed on controllers and pilots, the tragedy over Brooklyn will be duplicated again and again in other parts of the nation. — Bill Blundell
Editor:
News or Editorial?
Although it is for the UDK staff to set the policies of the paper, I feel that I must question the placement of that article in the paper. This article had the air of an editorial, but it was placed on the first page. If this was actually an editorial, (and it certainly was not first page news), it would have been
... Letters ...
I was rather confused by one of the UDK's recent articles. This article lauded the campus Maintenance Department for its excellent job of keeping the sidewalks and steps free of such impediments as ice.
more forceful if it had been placed on the editorial page above your editor's name.
On the other hand, if this was not an editorial, but instead (as I prefer to believe) a subtle satire, then it still should have been placed on the editorial page.
If the author of that article was sincere in his praise, he obviously does not have to traverse many steps in order to get to school. As much as I enjoy standing at the bottom of the stairs East of Fraser and watching the girls from Sellards practicing the art of gracefully slipping and falling. I do not enjoy traversing those stairs myself. I have not taken a poll of the
girls in the houses at the bottom of those stairs, but I feel that they would be almost unanimous in their desire for clean steps and dry posteriors.
I must admit that I was surprised that the sidewalks were cleaned so quickly after the recent storm. I'm sure that these men must work long hours, and I'm thankful for the clean sidewalks. Perhaps our Maintenance Department needs a mechanical device for cleaning steps. I cannot recall one instance of someone falling on our beautifully tractor cleaned sidewalks. The Maintenance Department seems to be addicted to things mechanical, as our pickup-chasing campus dogs will testify.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
Well, enough of my personal grips. Back to the real purpose of this letter. I feel that the above mentioned article was ineffectual. If the author was sincere, he obviously does not observe things as closely as people in closer contact with them do (e.g. the girls at Sellards). If he was trying to point out some deficiency, he was far too subtle about it.
- SO TIRED TODAY I ALMOST FELL ASLEEP IN CLASS.
Karl Smith Wichita senior
Short Ones
I like the New York Daily News because it's almost a perfect fit for the bottom of my canary's cage.— Fred Alton
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I want a nice, comfy bomb shelter in my backyard with a two-foot lead lining for my birthday.—Tommy Villesman
Polls indicate how people feel about a subject or a candidate at the time of the polling.—John F. Day
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Every generation has its favorite writer. Our favorite is the copy writer for Cadillac automobiles.— KU student theme
English teachers are working their way to extinction, for they no longer teach students how to write -R. L. Dennis
Daily Hansan UNIVERSITY
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
Telephone VIking 3-2700
Extension 376, business office
Member Inland Daily Press Association. Associated Collegiate Press. Represented by National Advertising Service, 18 East 50 St., New York 22, N.Y. News service: United Press International. Mail subscription rates: $3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the University year except Saturdays and Sundays, University holidays and examination periods. Entered as second-class matter Sept. 17, 1910, at Lawrence, Kan., post office under act of March 3. 1879.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Ray willer ... Managing Editor
Cewol Haller, Jane Boyd, Priscilla Burton and Carrie Edwards, Assistant
Managing Editors; Pat Shelley and Suzanne Shaw, City Editors; John
Macdonald, Sports Editor; Peggy Kallos and Donna Engle, Society
Editors.
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
John Peterson and Bill Blundell ... Co-Editorial Edito
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Mark Dull Business Manager
By Calder M. Pickett
Acting Dean, School of Journalism
THE GREAT ADVENTURE, by Pierce G. Fredericks. Dutton. $4.75.
Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks sold Liberty Bonds. The tearful were moved by "Just a Baby's Prayer at Twilight." American boys learned how to drink "vin rouge." The 40 and 8 came into being. Sauerkraut became liberty cabbage. Wilson enunciated his Fourteen Points. Alvin York became a national hero. Daring young men formed the Lafayette Escadrille. The "flu" swept the nation and took half a million lives.
He starts with April 1917, when America still had not entered the war to end wars. Wilson had squeaked by Charles Evans Hughes the November before because "he kept us out of war." Americans knew little about the European conflict, and those who did know were not at all convinced that this country should be fighting on alien soil.
This was World War I, the forgotten war. Pierce G. Fredericks, a picture editor of the New York Times, has written a highly readable history of that war. Though short on scholarship and stylistic brilliance, it moves along with the pace of a popular novel.
German submarine warfare had taken American lives, including the lives of 124 aboard the Lusitania. We were woefully unprepared for war, but when Wilson finally went before Congress and asked for a declaration he received cheers and strong support — though not unanimous support.
We look back at the First World War now and wonder that it could have been in the same century as the Second World War. Horses and mules appeared to play a bigger role than tanks. We had almost no aircraft. Fighting was little different from that in the Civil War, and our naivete about war is in a class with that displayed 60 years previously.
We were busier fighting on the Mexican border, and the commander of our expeditionary forces came from that fight, "Black Jack" Pershing. We were emotional and theatrical, and many were moved by that great announcement when soldiers arrived in France: "Lafayette, we are here!"
It was a short war, but it was a deadly one. America lost 116,516 men, 53,402 in battle, the rest by accident and sickness. A total of 205,690 had been wounded. All of this happened for the most part from early 1918 to Nov. 11.
In this country, everybody "kept the home fires burning." "Over there," National Guardsmen from Kansas and Missouri, slum boys from New York City, boys from Tennessee who knew how to use their squirrel rifles were fighting in battles in places with such strange names as Blank Mont, the Meuse-Argonne, St. Mihiel, and Chateau-Thierry.
Eddie Rickenbacker was becoming an ace, and Grover Cleveland Bergdoll was becoming the most famous draft dodger in history. Teddy Roosevelt's son Quentin was becoming a victim of the air war. George Creel was pepping up Americans with propaganda. LaFollette and Norris and Jeanette Rankin were calling it all futile. Irving Berlin was singing about how he hated to get up in the morning. Young officers named Douglas MacArthur and George Marshall were starting to build reputations.
Foch was becoming a hero who would lend his name to unfortunate babies in the United States. Clemenceau was on the eve of achieving a reputation as the bully who opposed Wilson at Versailles. An Austrian paper-hanger was starting to build a rationale for why the Germans lost the war. Christopher Morley was writing doggerel about our first three dead heroes—Gresham, Enright and Hay. Herbert Hoover was feeding starving Belgians, and Billy Mitchell was preparing for his assault on the admirals. The tin can fleet was going after German subs, and rickety planes were clattering across French skies.
Fredericks feels that World War I still had not taught Americans what they were fighting for. His conclusion: "... it would be another two twenty years before the nation as a whole stopped being angry about the responsibility and faced up to the fact that problems, as God-from-whom-atl-blessings-flow would be the first to admit, are permanent."