The Charlotte News

Friday, August 15, 1958

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Taipei, Formosa, that the top U.S. commander on Formosa, Vice-Admiral Roland Smoot, stated this date that the situation in the Formosa Strait was serious and that "anything could and might happen", but did not think that the Communist Chinese would launch an attack on Formosa.

In Shannon, Ireland, it was reported that all hope had been abandoned for finding any survivors among the 99 persons, including 52 or 53 Americans as passengers and eight crewmen, aboard a Dutch KLM airliner which had crashed in the Atlantic off Ireland's west coast the previous day. By midafternoon, 35 bodies had been recovered. The Super Constellation had either exploded or hit the sea with great force, with wreckage scattered over an area of four miles. An undertaker opined that the condition of the bodies indicated an explosion, but the cause of the crash had yet to be determined. The plane had been en route from Amsterdam to New York, had taken off from Shannon Airport after a refueling stop, and crashed in a violent storm, with its last radio contact having been 35 minutes after take-off, followed by silence, with no indication of trouble communicated. It was the highest death toll to date for any single plane crash of a commercial airliner and was the first commercial flight to crash in the North Atlantic after more than five million persons had flown the route since the end of World War II.

Because we have fallen behind, there will be no other summaries of either the front page or the editorial page this date, the notes henceforth to be sporadic until we catch up.

Framed Edition

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