LINER CRASHES

Wairarapa Daily Times, 22 July 1935, Page 5

LINER CRASHES

TRAGEDY IN THE AIR THIRTEEN PERSONS KILLED. Press Association Electric Telegraph—CoDyright MILAN, Saturday. The Royal Dutch air liner, PH-AKG, a Douglas, similar to that which competed in the Centenary Race, when en route from Milan to Frankfurt, : crashed near San Bernardino, Switzerland, during a severe storm. The thirteen occupants were killed. They included two British subjects. The others were Dutch. The cause of the disaster is unknown.

The British victims are Commander Arthur Watts, D. 5.0., and Mr Louis Mariano Nesbitt, a mining engineer and the author of books on Abyssinia, where he travelled adventurously in districts from which whites formerly had not returned- alive. - .

Commander Watts was hastening from Italy to re-join his wife, who recently gave birth to their second son. An airline company official states that the pilot, Van Der Veist, when crossing the frontier of Switzerland, encountered fog and asked for a bearing from Milan 15 minutes before the crash. He then wound in the aerial, owing to the thunderstorm. He came out of the clouds and found himself too near the ground, and therefore attempted to climb up through the clouds, but collided until a mountain-side. The villagers of San Bernardino state that the aeroplane crashed into a pine forest clothing a deep ravine with such violence that debris was flung up. The propeller was later found embedded in a tree fifty yards distant. Rescuers rushed to the spot and found all dead but Mademoiselle Hermanides, the first of four stewardesses recently engaged, who was making her first trip from Holland. She was hastily extricated, but died in a few minutes. PUBLIC SHOCKED. THE HAGUE, Saturday, The public is deeply shocked at the third disaster in a week after a long period almost without tragedy. The air line 'announces the suspension of the Milan service until the cause of the disaster is established. It will be operated by Lufthansa. Owing to a shortage of pilots due to the two previous crashes, the K.L.M. Company will shortly close down the Amsterdam-Livc-rpool service.