ELECTRA CRASHES AND BURNS
T.E.A.L. Crew Escape From Wreck Unhurt
(New Zealand Press Association)
AUCKLAND, March 28.
A Tasman Empire Airways’ Electra airliner crashed and burned out during an emergency procedures training landing at Whenuapai at 6.45 a.m. on Saturday.
The crew and training staff bai led out of the flight deck as it slid to a stop in a mass of smoke and flame.
The only casualty was Neville McKay, T.E.A.L.’s industrial personnel manager. He suffered slight burns to one finger and the palm of a hand.
The aircraft crashed while Captain C. J. Le Couteur, the company’s captain in charge of emergency procedures, was bringing it in on a full glide approach under minimum power.
The crash is the first serious accident in the airline’s 25 years of operations.
In a statement issued shortly after the crash, T.E.A.L. said Captain Le Couteur was undergoing a regular sixmonthly check on flying procedures with Captain W. P. N. Clarke in command.
T.E.A.L. said the aircraft was believed to have landed heavily, breaking the wing. The fire followed immediately. Mr F. A. Reeves, the general manager, said a full company inquiry into the cause of the crash was opened on Saturday morning.
The others in the aircraft were two flight engineers, Mr J. Cranston and Mr K. Baldock, and Mr T. Dyer, the company’s emergency procedures training officer. They bailed out of hatches and flight-deck windows as flames engulfed the passenger section.
Eye-witnesses said the Electra was making a steep ap
proach without power, the equivalent of a “dead-stick” landing in small aircraft. Mr L. King, working on a paving contract in front of the R.N.Z.A.F. hangars, said: “He was coming in steep and very fast. He tried to get out of it by pulling the nose up. “But he couldn’t, and the tail hit. Then it was just bang. Bits and pieces fell off in all directions and there was a cloud of smoke.” The Electra slid along the northern end of the runway and slewed on to the grass at the eastern side while emergency sirens and alarms rang through Whenuapai Air Force base and civil airline emergency rooms.
It cast off landing gear, pieces of tail plane, crumpled propellers, engines and wings along a charred and scarred path hundreds of yards long. Flames sprang from the crumbled centre of the main cabin—the fuselage was still in one piece—and from a section of wing containing two engines.
“One bloke climbed out the pilot’s window,” said Mr King. “It was a long way to the ground, but I don’t think he was worried—be just dropped.”
Smoke obscured the exits of the other crew members and training staff. Another worker on the paving contract, Mr S. I. Jelicich, said: “It sort of came down very sharply, hit and bounced a bit, then exploded. There was smoke and fire straight away.” Constable R. Harris, of the Whenuapai police, was brewing his morning cup of tea when “I heard a thump, thump, thump and a few seconds later the crash siren went.
“It was really blazing when the fire tenders arrived,” he said.
Whenuapai and Hobsonville fire crews smothered the blaze in foam.
The charred hulk, registration letters ZK-TEC burned clearly into the after fuselage, was cordoned off by airmen carrying rifles and bayonets.
The chief inspector of air accidents for the Civil Aviation Department, Wing Commander O. J. O’Brien said tonight there was no suggestion that the other Electra airliners would be grounded as a result of the crash. He said he had not yet finished his investigations and would continue with them tomorrow.
Any recommendation that the Electras would be grounded would come from the Civil Aviation Department whose representatives were part of the investigating team. “So far,” he said, “we have not found it necessary .to make any recommendation.”
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