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The darkened navigational beacons hid the mountains and cost them their lives · Aviation Survival Stories

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: At 7 minutes past 7, on the evening of January 16, 1942,
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: TWA Flight 3 lifted off from Las Vegas, carrying 22
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: people and no way to see the mountains ahead. The
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: navigational beacons that should have warned the crew were dark,
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: switched off to keep Japanese bombers from using them as guides.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: The bombers never came. The mountain was already there. 33
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: minutes after takeoff, the aircraft struck double-up peak on Potosi
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: Mountain at roughly 8,300 feet When rescuers reached the wreckage
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: the next day, there were no survivors. Among the dead
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: was Carole Lombard, 33 years old, the highest paid actress
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: in Hollywood history, flying home after raising $ 2 million for
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: the war effort in a single evening. A safety measure
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: built to protect the country is what killed her instead.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: That is the fact that we'll not let go, not
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: the fame, not the altitude, not even the war itself,
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: the bitter specific irony that the precaution meant to save
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: lives is exactly what made the mountain invisible. And there
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: is one more detail, buried in the production records of
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: her final film, that makes this story stranger still. A
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: line of dialogue, cut from the finished picture. Nobody has
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: ever been able to confirm when the cut was made,
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: or why. Hold on to that. We will come back
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: to it. To understand what was lost on that mountain,
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: go back first to a street in Fort Wayne, Indiana,
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: around 1920, where a 12-year-old girl named Jane Alice Peters
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: was playing baseball with a group of neighborhood boys and
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: beating them. A film director named Alan Dwan happened to
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: be watching. He cast her on the spot in a
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: silent picture called A Perfect Crime. She had no training,
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: no agent, no plan to become an actress. She was
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: just the kid who could throw. That instinct toward motion,
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: toward the center of things, never left her. By October
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: of 1924, she had a contract with Fox Film Corporation,
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: $ 75 a week. It did not last. Fox declined to
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: renew her after a single picture. She signed with Paramount
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: instead and started over from nothing. 17 years later, that
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: same refusal to sit still would put her on an
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: airplane instead of a train. But first, on September 9th, 1925,
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: it very nearly ended her. She was riding in a
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: car driven by a man named Harry Cooper when the
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: windshield shattered. Glass opened her face from her nose, across
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: her left cheek, toward her eye. The wound needed surgery.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: The lawsuit settled out of court for $ 3, 000. No settlement
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: could answer the real question, which was whether her face
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: and her career along with it would survive intact. The
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: scar healed. The industry's reaction to it did not. Producers
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: told her plainly that the camera would find every imperfection.
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: So at 19, she taught herself to out-argue the camera.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: Studying exactly where to stand, how to turn her head,
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: which angle let the scar dissolve into the light. It
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: looked like natural grace. It was calculation. rehearsed until it
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: looked like nothing at all. Max Sennett gave her a
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: second chance, 18 short comedies between September of 1927 and
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: March of 1929. He nicknamed her Carole of the Curves.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: The name stuck to the persona and missed the point entirely.
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: Underneath it was a physical comedian with a stage veteran's timing,
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: someone who had spent her whole life performing for an
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: audience that was not quite paying attention. Now hold all
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: of that against Indiana. On a January night 17 years
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: after Fort Wayne, at the end of a war bond tour.
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: In one evening there, Lombard had raised $ 2 million for
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: the war effort. More money, faster than almost anyone else
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: on the tour had managed. She had spent hours being watched, applauded,
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: asked to give a little more, and give it again.
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: Now the tour was finished, and there was only the
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: question of how to get home. Her mother, Bessie and
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: Otto Winkler, Clark Gable's press agent, wanted the train. Winkler
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: had a documented fear of flying, and he said so plainly.
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: The train would take two days, Lombard had just spent
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: an evening convincing a room full of strangers to hand
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: over their money for a cause she believed in, and
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: she was not interested in three more days on a
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: rail car when a plane could have her home by morning.
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: If you have ever pushed for the faster way home
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: because you were the one who was exhausted, and everyone
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: else could simply be persuaded, you already understand exactly what
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: happened next. She prevailed. The argument did not last long.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: That is what makes it matter. Before the plane, though,
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: there was still a decade of ground she had covered.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: She changed her name, legally, to Carol Lombard. She married
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: the actor William Powell in June of 1931, and they
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: divorced two years later, amicably enough that Powell later insisted
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: she be cast opposite him in a comedy called My
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: Man Godfrey. That film earned her the only Academy Award
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: nomination of her career. By 1937, she was earning $ 450, 000
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: a year, more than five times the salary of the
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: President of the United States, and Franklin Roosevelt sent her
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: a personal letter of thanks for it. She was 28.
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: and she had already turned every setback of the previous
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: 20 years. The scar. The studio that dropped her. The
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: nickname that undersold her. Into forward motion. In March of 1939,
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: she and Clark Gable eloped to Kingman, Arizona, and settled
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: on a ranch in Encino. By most accounts it was
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: the steadiest thing in either of their lives, a marriage
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: that surprised an industry not used to being surprised. In
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: the fall of 1941, she finished filming a dark comedy
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: with Ernst Lubitsch and Jack Benny, called To Be or
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: Not To Be. It was still being edited when the
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: War Bond tour called her east, to Indiana, to the
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: $ 2 million raised in one evening, and to the argument
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: about how to get home. She won the argument. TWA
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: Flight 3 left Indianapolis on January 15, 1942, with a
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: refueling stop planned in Albuquerque and a second in Las Vegas.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: In Las Vegas, the aircraft took on 15 more passengers,
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: United States Army soldiers, traveling under orders. 22 people now, total,
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: climbing south out of the desert at 7 minutes past
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: 7 in the evenings. toward the Spring Mountains and a
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: ridge called Double Up Peak. Here is the first image
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: that does not add up. The Spring Mountains were a
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: known feature of that corridor. The crew held valid certifications
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: for the route. The weather, while cold, was not catastrophically bad.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: What the crew did not have, what no aircraft on
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: that route had that night, was any signal from the
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: navigational beacons that normally marked where the terrain rose out
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: of the desert floor. Those beacons had been switched off
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: five weeks earlier, after Pearl Harbor. on the theory that
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: Japanese bomber formations might use American radio signals to find
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: their way to American cities. It was sound reasoning followed
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: all the way through. The beacons were a liability, so
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: they went dark. No Japanese bombers ever reached the Nevada desert.
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: What flew into that gap instead was a civilian airliner
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: navigating by dead reckoning. Dead reckoning meant the crew knew
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: roughly where they were, based on heading and speed in
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: elapsed time, and roughly where the mountains had to be.
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: It did not mean they could see the mountains, or
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: measure with any precision how much air separated the aircraft
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: from rock it could not confirm electronically, and could not
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: confirm by eye, in the dark, in January. 33 minutes
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: after leaving Las Vegas, still climbing, the plane struck double
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: up peak. There was no distress call, no indication anything
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: was wrong. It simply stopped transmitting, which in 1942 meant
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: it disappeared entirely, with no signal and no wreckage anyone
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: could reach until morning. One theory holds that the crew
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: cut inside the standard arc that night, trying to make
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: up time after the Las Vegas stop, and that the
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: impact point on the peak's upper southern face supports it.
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: But even crews flying the correct approved heading that night
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: were flying with less information than peacetime procedure demanded. Beacons off,
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: mountains invisible, was the condition either way. The strongest conclusion
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: the investigation reached was simple. The wartime blackout removed a
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: layer of protection the terrain required, and Flight 3 flew
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: straight into the space the protection used to cover. No
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: mechanical failure, no storm severe enough to be decisive on
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: its own, No negligence anyone was ever charged with. A precaution,
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: reasoned all the way through, correctly implemented, and fatally mistimed.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: Rescue teams could not reach Double Up Peak until the
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: next day. The terrain required a climb, and the site
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: was unreachable in darkness. When searchers arrived on January 17th,
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: they found no survivors among the 22. The soldiers, the
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: flight crew, Bessie, Otto Winkler, and Carol Lombard. Winkler is
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: worth a moment. He had voiced his fear out loud.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: He had sided with Bessie, arguing for the train, and
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: he had lost that argument the way people who are
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: afraid of the right thing sometimes lose it. Not because
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: he was wrong, but because he was outranked by someone
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: more certain than he was. He boarded the plane anyway,
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: because Lombard had decided, and that was apparently enough to
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: end it. He is the smallest figure in this story,
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: and of everyone on that mountain, possibly the one whose
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: presence makes it hardest to look away, because he is
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: the only one who knew, going in, exactly what he
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: was afraid of. In Los Angeles... Clark Gable went to
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: sleep on the night of January 16th, not knowing the
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: flight was missing. He found out the next morning. He
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: got in a car and drove toward Nevada, toward a
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: mountain he had never seen, to stand at the base
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: of something that had already taken everything it was going
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: to take. He was stopped before he reached the site.
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: The terrain too severe, the wreckage too complete, for there
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: to be any reason for him to go further. There
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: was nothing at the top of that mountain that needed him,
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: and nothing he could do there would bring anyone back
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: down it. He turned around and drove back to the
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: ranch in Encino. He was 38 years old. Two days later,
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: on January 18th, Jack Benny's radio program aired its regular
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: Sunday broadcast. Benny had just finished filming with Lombard. His
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: show was one of the most popular in the country,
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: and millions of people tuned in expecting comedy. There was
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: no comedy that night, only music. No explanation was given
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: on the air. None was needed. A comedy program with
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: the jokes removed is its own kind of announcement, and
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: the audience understood it instantly, without a single word. Now,
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: the detail we set aside at the start. The Be
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: or Not to Be was released in March of 1942,
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: two months after Lombard's death. Buried in the Production Code
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: Administration's paperwork for the film is an addendum. A line
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: of die originally spoken by Lombard's character, referencing an air pocket,
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: does not appear in the finished picture. The addendum confirms
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: the line was cut. It does not confirm when. If
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: it was cut before January 16th, that is a coincidence
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: precise enough to be uncomfortable. If it was cut afterward,
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: then someone, quietly and without announcement, made the decision to
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: spare audiences the experience of hearing a dead woman joke
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: about the exact thing that had just killed her. The
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: record holds the gap open either way. It has never closed.
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: What the civil aeronautics board did close eventually was the
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: technical question. The cause of the crash was recorded as
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: navigational failure in mountainous terrain, compounded by the wartime blackout
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: of the radio range beacons. No charges were filed. No
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: individual was found responsible. The reasoning behind the blackout had
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: been sound. Bombers had hit Pearl Harbor five weeks before.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: Radio beacons could theoretically guide an enemy toward American cities,
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: so the beacons had to go dark. That reasoning did
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: not change. What changed is that 33 minutes after taking
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: off from Las Vegas, a civilian airliner flew into the
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: exact terrain those beacons used to mark. No enemy action
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: killed Carol A. Lombard. A precaution against enemy action did.
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: That distinction never mattered legally. It has mattered morally ever since,
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: and it mattered just as much for the 15 soldiers
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: aboard and for the families waiting on them. Those men
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: were already in uniform, already committed to the war, already
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: prepared for the possibility that they might not come home
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: from it. What they had signed up for was combat,
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: somewhere overseas, for something with a name. What killed them
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: was the machinery of the war effort itself, the precaution
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: built to protect the country they were traveling to defend.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: There is no comfortable place to file that, and this
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: story does not offer one. What it offers instead is
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: what came after, which is not comfort exactly, but it
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: is something. Lombard was interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: in Glendale, Her mother, Bessie, was placed beside her. Clark Gable,
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: who had hesitated for months about enlisting. He was in
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: his 40s. He was the biggest star in Hollywood, and
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: the logistics of losing him to a war would have
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: been complicated for an entire industry. He stopped hesitating. He
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: joined the United States Army Air Forces and flew five
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: combat missions over Europe. Lombard had asked him to serve
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: repeatedly before the crash. He had always had a reason
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: to wait. After January of 1942, he did not wait
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: any longer. Two years later, To the day, on January 15th, 1944,
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: the Liberty ship SS Carole Lombard was launched. It served
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: in the Pacific theater for the rest of the war.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: And over the course of its service, it rescued hundreds
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: of survivors from the water. A ship carrying her name
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: spent the remainder of the war pulling living people out
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: of the sea in the same ocean where the war
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: she had died supporting was still being fought. It is
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: a strange kind of afterlife for a person to keep
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: saving strangers under your own name after you were gone.
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: But that is what happened. When Gable died in November
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: of 1960, He was buried beside her under a stone
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: that reads, Carole Lombard Gable. Bessie rests on the other side.
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: The man who had been turned back from the mountain
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: 18 years earlier reached her in the end by the
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: only route that was ever left open to him. History
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: has been stingy with her in its own quiet way.
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: The American Film Institute later ranked her the 23rd greatest
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: female star of classic Hollywood. One nomination for My Man Godfrey.
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: No win. The record has always undercounted comedians. the ones
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: who make it look easy enough that nobody stops to
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: ask how hard it actually is to be that precise,
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: that fast, that in control of a room. It undercounted her, too.
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: What the record cannot undercount, because the number itself is
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: the argument, is the plain fact of it. At 33
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: years old, a girl from Fort Wayne, who once got
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: cast in a movie for being good at baseball, had
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: become the highest-paid actress in Hollywood history, out-earning the President
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: of the United States five times over. There is one
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: image that keeps returning, if you sit with this long enough.
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: A 12-year-old girl playing baseball, hitting better than the boys
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: around her. A director walking past, stopping, watching, casting her
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: on the spot. She has no idea what is coming.
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: What is coming is a windshield, and a scar, and
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: a studio executive telling her it might be over. And
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: then 19 years of learning, one film at a time,
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: one camera angle at a time, to face the thing
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: that had damaged her and find the light inside it anyway.
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: She became the highest-paid actress in the world. She raised
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: $ 2 million for the war in a single evening. She
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: got on a plane to come home to the man
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: she loved, and a mountain took her at 33. The
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: part of this story that never resolves is not the
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: cause of the crash. That was found, named, and closed
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: by people with clipboards. What does not resolve is the arithmetic.
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: A scar she outmaneuvered for 20 years. A studio that
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: dropped her and a career she rebuilt anyway. A nickname
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: that undersold her and a body of work that outlasted it.
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: All of it weighed against a beacon that went dark
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: for a war that needed it dark. On the one
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: night it mattered most. No amount of skill at angling
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: toward the light changes what happens when the light itself
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: is switched off by people with a good reason and
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: no way of knowing who was flying through the dark
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: they created. She had spent 20 years learning exactly how
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: to angle her face toward the light. On the night
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: of January 16, 1942, there was no light left to find.
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: This show is made by Obomedia.