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Meanwhile co-pilot Hendrick, who had helped Joslyn tame that death spiral after the engine blew, and engineer Kerwick, who’d struggled with the throttles, had clambered out the emergency exit over the right side of the plane. After jumping into the drink, they’d found themselves faced with an impossible task: swim around the sinking airplane to reach the life rafts on the other side, which the light surface wind was blowing away faster than they could swim. They wouldn’t make it, and the survivors in the life raft had to listen to their dwindling cries as the wind carried them away. A young banker from Auburn, David Darrow, also was unable to reach the life rafts, and an 80-year-old passenger named John Peterson died in his wife’s arms after being pulled aboard one of the life rafts. “I didn’t know it was John,” Mrs. Peterson told Associated Press reporter Elmer Vogel. “I just noticed that someone had been dragged in all covered with oil. I lifted his head up and laid it in my lap so it wouldn’t lie in the water on the bottom of the life raft. He opened his eyes and smiled weakly, then said, ‘Oh, is that you, Emma?’ Then he didn’t say any more.” More would doubtless have followed, but luckily a Navy ship was 18 miles away when the plane went down, and less than two hours later help was on the scene. Most of the survivors were badly chilled, but only one — a young Seattle woman named Patricia Lacey, whose leg was broken in the crash — suffered a serious injury (other than death, of course). She was rescued by purser Natalie Parker, who swam around the airplane to retrieve her as she lay unconscious in the water, and dragged her around the airplane in time to catch the last raft as the wind blew it past the broken-off tail section. In the end, 19 of the original 23 passengers and crew made it home safe. However, most of them were now faced with a decision: should they call off their vacations and go home, or get on another airplane? For Gail Dillingham, 18, there wasn’t much choice. She lived in Hawaii, and would have to get home somehow. During the hearing on April 20, a member of the crowd asked her how she planned to go. “United Airlines,” she quipped.
SEVERAL MONTHS LATER, the investigation concluded that propeller failure was to blame. The tip of one of the propeller blades had apparently started to tear — causing the vibration that Captain Joslyn mistook for a cowl flap — then ripped loose and flew off, at which point the engine ripped itself loose in a cloud of fuel mixture which was ignited by the engine exhausts. Luckily, the 220-knot slipstream blew the fire out like a candle flame; had all the gasoline that ended up floating on the sea after the ditching caught fire, many more would have died. The engine, the report continued, had physically removed a link in the electrical circuit when it went, disabling all electrical power on the wings. This had apparently disabled the servo-motors on the elevator flaps, making the controls very difficult to move; and the constant-speed propeller hubs, making it impossible to change the power settings. In the end, the lessons learned in the accident — especially the 14 recommendations that the heroic purser, Natalie Parker, offered at the preliminary hearing — ended up saving hundreds of lives in future ditchings over the years.
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