Newspaper Article on the Deaths of Paul and Libbie Peck

Worst Crash in Aviation History

Fifty-five die as Bolivian P-38 pilot rams Eastern airliner landing at Washington. The big Eastern airliner was about 500 feet off the ground landing under good conditions at Washington on November 1. Sunday a P-38 fighter zoomed out of nowhere and rammed the airliner; together the planes crashed into the Potomac. All 55 people in the big plane were killed at once. The P-38 pilot, Erick Rios Bridoux, director of civil aeronautics in Bolivia, who was in the U.S. To study airport administration was dragged half-dead from the water.

It was the worst plane crash in the history of civil aviation. Only Bridoux, a U.S.-licensed pilot, could explain it -- and at week's end he was still alive but no one was able to say whether radio or mechanical failure had caused him to ignore the frantic warnings from the control tower. Among the dead were some well-known people -- Representative George Bates of Massachusetts, Helen Hokinson, cartoonist (?) drawings of blandly purposeful suburban women -- and some obscure ones -- a 1-1/2 year old baby, two Puerto Rican nurses. Mrs. Lillie Perkins, a grandmother, had chose this plane in which to make her first and last flight. Michael Kennedy, former Tammany politician, had a seat on a later plane, but suddenly decided to take this one. Some of the dead on Flight 537 had raced to make it; some had delayed. Each had his reason. But no one could look at the quiet gallery of 55 faces without wondering, as Thornton Wilder wondered in The Bridge of San Luis Rey: "Some say that we shall never know and that to the gods we are like flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God."

BOLIVIAN PILOT Erick Rios Bridoux, 28, is a national hero, once rescued 117 marooned women and children during a flood in his country. He broke ribs and vertebrae in crash, went into relapse when he heard of the 55 deaths.