Carole Lombard died tragically in an air accident on January 16, 1942, just over one month after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. She was returning from an enormously successful war bonds tour– she was in the vanguard of Hollywood stars helping to raise money for the war effort–and the night flight, a fairly routine one over the Las Vegas desert in the substantial and reliable DC-3–ended in disaster when the plane failed to clear a mountain by a mere 500 feet, crashing into the terrain. For years various crackpot theories involving sabotage and the like have floated about and it turns out someone wrote a book about the whole tragedy called ‘Fireball’. Above are two clips–a semi-promotional reel for the book explaining the event in detail, and a Paramount newsreel of the time mourning the death of the star. My own very unsophisticated take (based on my reading of Ernest Gann’s great early-flying memoir ‘Fate Is The Hunter’) is that, instruments or not, flight was still very much subject to human error. Minor mishaps, which would now be easily corrected by a variety of back-up systems, were left in the hands of humans to correct assuming they made the corrections in time. We take flight safety for granted these days but its important to remember how new passenger air travel was as late as the early 40’s and how insistent so many people were that they’d never get on a plane since they were bound to ‘fall out of the sky’. In that sense it feels rather like my (and others) aversion to riding in those unfathomably weird driver-less car services that abound in Los Angeles. One day my fears will be laughed off. Meantime, I’m not getting into one of those things. It might fall off the road…