Photos Show Airline Pilots Asleep, Reading

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29931, 19 September 1962, Page 17

Photos Show Airline Pilots Asleep, Reading

WASHINGTON, Sept. 17. Congressional investigators today examined 39 photographs which allegedly showed American pilots asleep, or reading newspapers and magazines, while flying airliners.

One picture purportedly showed an airline hostess at the controls during a flight. A Democrat representative, Mr John Moss, said it indicated a "shocking situation,” United Press International reported. But he sand he found it “equally disturbing” that the pictures were not turned over to the Federal Aviation Agency by the Flight Engineers’ Union until more than a year after they were taken. At a Government sub-com-mittee inquiry today, D. K. Carson, an Eastern Airlines flight engineer. now on strike, testified that he took the pictures with a hidden camera using infra-red film which did not require a flash. He told the sub-committee he was intimidated into keep-

ing the pictures in his private possession.

Knowledge that the pictures existed apparently became known in the industry, Oarson said, and he began to receive anonymous telephone calls advising him to keep his children off the streets. Carson said a Trans-Worid Airline flight engineer. W. J. Miller, who had taken a similar series of pictures, had also been "frightened.’’ "Maybe I’m a coward,” Carson told the sub-commit-tee, “but I bad my family to think of."

Some of Carson’s pictures received national attention early in August when they were published in newspapers across the United States. The F.A.A. later obtained a full set of the photographs and the F.A.A. Administrator, Mr Najeeb Halaby, told the sub-committee today that "a very intensive inquiry” was now in progress.