Page:CAB Accident Report, Pennsylvania Central Airlines Flight 19.pdf/46

 of magnitude of the probable speed. Although it would be impossible to determine the speed at contact with any accuracy from the condition of wreckage, the completeness of the destruction at least indicated a speed far above that of ordinary flight. The damage, which technicians who have had past occasion to examine a great many wrecked airplanes that have be contact with the ground in all sorts of attitudes and at all sorts of speeds found almost unprecedented in their experience, would be difficult to with a speed of less than 300 m.p.h.

If the airplane had gone into a vertical dive at 5,500 feet, and had then continued the vertical path very nearly to the ground, with the machine in process of recovering from the dive when it hit, the time from the first deviation from the normal flight path to the impact would have been about 15 seconds. If the descent had been along a steady 30-degree inclination, the corresponding time would have been approximately 30 seconds.

The best estimates of the time interval that elapsed between the time of the lighting flash and the final crash of the airplane, obtained by reconstructing the movements of persons who saw the lightning and heard the crash and engaged in some definite activity in the interval, put it at about 15 to 20 seconds. Though that figure cannot be regarded as a very reliable one, if it be accepted as valid, it would require either that airplane's first deviation from its path preceded the lightning flash with which the crash was so generally connected, or that the dive was very nearly a vertical one through the greater part of its length, and must in that event have started after the airplane was well into the area of the heavy rainstorm.

One difficulty with the assumption of a straight descent at a constant