Page:CAB Accident Report, United Airlines Flight 21.pdf/21

 assumed to be United 21, proceeding southeast across the airport at a 400 to 500-foot altitude. He did not notice the flight of the aircraft again until he saw it in a shallow turn east of the field. The navigation and landing lights were on and the plane continued in this turn until aligned with the railroad tracks on the northern boundary of the field. The plane was losing altitude as though for a landing until it reached the eastern boundary of the field, at an altitude estimated by the witness to be 100 feet, when the pilot gunned the motors and the aircraft continued across the field climbing in a westerly direction just north of the north of the railroad tracks. Captain Smith did not see the aircraft again, but did see the flare of the crash a few minutes later.

Mr. Raymond J. Dutch, a radio operator for Northwest Airlines, was in the companionway back of the pilot's compartment of a Northwest Airlines plane standing in front of the American Airlines hangar about 50 feet due west of the southeast end of the northwest runway. In this position he had a clear view of the approaching aircraft and first noticed it when it was about two or two and one-half miles directly southeast of the airport in line with the northwest runway. The aircraft was proceeding directly toward him and he assumed from the position of the landing and navigation lights that it was in a normal glide. A short distance from the airport at an altitude which he estimated as 175 feet, the aircraft seemed to level off, which the witness attributed to a thermal up-draft or rough air. The left wing whipped abruptly down and the right wing camp up. The aircraft turned directly west and passed out of sight behind the American Airlines Hangar. When he last saw the aircraft it was still in a vertical position with the