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Mr. S. Janas            1/26/47

Mr. A. Gitt

Air Safety

There are two underlying causes quite evident in most of the airline crackups that have occured recently.

1. The lack of adequate communications.
2. Too many people are taking this air transportation business for granted, with a resultant lack of thorough preparedness which used to be so much in evidence not too long ago, when crackups did not occur so frequently.

I will attempt to qualify these statements in the following way.
1. Communications, as now used, work fine when the weather is good. However, once the weather takes a turn for the worse, than communications stay with the weather and suffer as a result. We now have bad weather and an increase in communication traffic due to more detailed Airways clearances and instrument approaches being made. In addition, flights are now taking longer to complete, all of which creates a terrific strain on the "single party line telephone" communication used by the respective airlines. To make matters worse, this "single party line telephone" is now cluttered up with atmospheric conditions such as: static, (thunderstorms, snow, rain, northern lights, etc.) skip conditions, (caused by sun-spots, night effect, etc..) All this does not only effect communications, but also range reception. This condition makes it necessary to ask for "repeats" on messages. A good example of all this is what occured on the night in the early part of January, this year, when a certain airline airplane was fortunately landed on Jones Beach. The pilot was so utterly lost that he thought he had landed on the Connecticut shore until the U. S. Coast Guard triangulated his position and located him on Jones Beach, Long Island. Another such incident occured on the night of November 21, 1943, when a congressman lost his life in a Navy airplane at Willow Grove, Pa., and about a dozen different crackups occured in the Eastern half of the United States, most of them between Pittsburgh and New York. Military crews were bailing out and planes were flying pilotless for considerable distances before cracking up. Communications failed that night. How about the night a certain airline airplane, not too long ago, landed at Atlantic City after a failure of range reception because of thunderstorm activity?