TWA Flight 3 was flying a transcontinental route from New York to greater Los Angeles with multiple intermediate stops, including Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Albuquerque, with a final destination of Burbank, California. At 4:00 local time on the morning of January 16, 1942 in Indianapolis, Indiana, Carole Lombard, her mother, and her MGM press agent boarded Flight 3 to return to California. Lombard, anxious to meet her husband Clark Gable in Los Angeles, was returning from a successful War Bonds promotion tour in the Midwest, where she helped raise over $2,000,000. Upon arrival in Albuquerque, Lombard and her companions were asked to give up their seats for the continuing flight segment to make room for 15 U.S. Army Air Corps personnel flying to California. Lombard insisted that because of her War Bonds effort, she, too, was essential, and she convinced the station agentto let her group reboard the flight. Other passengers were removed instead, including violinist Joseph Szigeti. The original flight crew was replaced by a new crew at Albuquerque. A refueling stop was planned at Winslow, Arizona, because of the higher passenger load and forecast headwinds. However, the captain decided while en route to skip the Winslow stop and to proceed directly to Las Vegas. After a brief refueling stop at what is now Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, the plane took off on a clear, moonless night for its final leg to Burbank. Fifteen minutes later, flying almost seven miles off course, it crashed into a near vertical cliff on Potosi Mountain in the Spring Mountain range at 7,770 ft, about below the top of the cliff and below the summit, killing all on board instantly.
Investigation
The accident was investigated by the Civil Aeronautics Board. Eyewitness and other evidence suggested Flight 3 proceeded from its departure in Las Vegas along essentially a straight line, 10° right of the designated airway, into high terrain that rose above their flight altitude of. This indicated to investigators that the crew was not using radio navigation to follow the airway, which would have provided them safe obstacle clearance, but was instead using a compass heading. Visibility was generally good, but since most airway light beacons had been turned off because of the war, they were not usable, although one important beacon was in fact operating normally. A key piece of evidence was the flight plan form, completed by the first officer in Albuquerque. In the form, the planned outbound magnetic course from Las Vegas was filled out as 218°, which is close to the flight path actually flown by the crew to the crash point. Since this course, flown at 8,000 ft, is lower than the terrain in that direction, the board concluded it was clearly an error. The board speculated that since both pilots had flown to Burbank much more frequently from Boulder City Airport than from Las Vegas, and that from Boulder City Airport an outbound magnetic course of 218° would have been a reasonable choice to join the airway to Burbank, the crew likely inadvertently used the Boulder City outbound course instead of the appropriate Las Vegas course. Boulder City Airport was not used as refueling point on this trip since it had no runway lighting. To test their hypothesis, the CAB asked to review some other completed TWA flight plan forms for flights between Albuquerque and Las Vegas. Surprisingly, they discovered another form, of an actual flight, which also specified the same incorrect 218° outbound course from Las Vegas as the accident flight. TWA's chief pilot testified that the course filled out on that form was "obviously a mistake." The CAB issued a final report with the following probable cause statement:
Upon the basis of the foregoing findings and of the entire record available at this time, we find that the probable cause of the accident to aircraft NC 1946 on January 16, 1942, was the failure of the captain after departure from Las Vegas to follow the proper course by making use of the navigational facilities available to him.
The CAB added the following contributing factors:
The use of an erroneous compass course
Blackout of most of the beacons in the neighborhood of the accident made necessary by the war emergency
Failure of the pilot to comply with TWA's directive of July 17, 1941, issued in accordance with a suggestion from the Administrator of Civil Aeronautics requesting pilots to confine their flight movements to the actual on-course signals
Conspiracy
In the book My Lunches with Orson, Orson Welles claims that he had been told by a security agent that the aircraft was shot down by Nazi agents who knew of the route in advance. He also claimed that the shooting was hushed up to prevent vigilante action against Americans with German ancestry. This theory has been questioned by Robert Matzen in his book Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3.
