Page:CAB Accident Report, Pennsylvania Central Airlines Flight 19.pdf/43

 flash, and shortly after the machine had passed over their home, Mr. McGaha, in fact, was so sure of his own observation that he had gone out of the house and walked to a considerable distance to look for the wrecked airplane, which he thought might have struck the ground on his own land. Proceeding from that observation, it must be concluded that the deviation from the normal path started at least 1¾ miles short of the point of impact, as it was approximately at that distance that the heavy rainfall began, and rain as heavy as clearly existed at the time and place of the accident would have made it impossible to see anything that airplane might have done after it had entered the storm. Mr. McGaha pointed out to an investigator for the Board the point at which he had been standing when he saw the airplane and the angle above the ground at which he recalled it as having appeared to him when its dive began. Analysis of that point, however, makes it appear impossible to depend on such a recollection of angles as a basis for analysis of the path. It is not surprising that it should be so, for it is of course externally difficult to recall a line of sight exactly, especially after a considerable lapse of time. Mr. McGaha's recollection was that he had seen the airplane start its dive, immediately after the lightning flash, at a point found to be at an angle of 11 degrees above the horizontal. Since Mr. McGaha's home was at a distance of 2½ miles from the easternmost edge of the rainstorm, the reported angle of his line of sight would have placed the aircraft approximately 2500 feet above the ground at the time of starting the dive. Since Mr. McGaha identified the airplane, by comparison with another machine of similar size subsequently seen at a known altitude, as having passed over his house and continued at a height of about 6000 feet above sea level, his estimate of the angle at which he had seen the airplane go into a dive (a much more difficult point to fix in memory) must be considered as having been in error.