BOEING JETS

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28981, 24 August 1959, Page 11

BOEING JETS

Grounding Is Unlikely

(Rec. 8 p.m.) WASHINGTON, August 22. Facts “weigh heavily against a general grounding order” of the Boeing 707 jet airliner, according to the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Agency (Mr E. R. Quesada). Mr Quesada made his comment in a letter to a New York Republican member of the House of Representatives, Mr Steven Derounian, who last week urged that the jets be grounded. Qantas recently began flying Boeing 707’s on its international routes from Australia.

Mr Derounian asked that the planes be grounded a few hours after a Boeing 707 crashed on Long Island last Saturday during a training flight. All five crewmen aboard were killed. Mr Quesada said that while his first concern was with the public interest and the unnecessary loss of life and injuries in air accidents, the "facts weigh heavily against a < general grounding order.”

At the time of its certification less than a year ago, the Boeing 707 was found to be “one of the best engineered products American aviation is capable of producing,” he said.

The Boeing Airplane Company and the Federal Aviation Agency had spent five years testing and evaluating the plane. “Thousands of persons have been carried in the 707 without serious injury to anyone,” Mr Quesada said.

The military version, the KCI3S tanker, had been flown by the United States Air Force for thousands of hours without developing “unairworthiness characteristics which even suggest that a grounding Is necessary.”