An Unsolved Mystery

The innovative design of the Boeing 247 helped launch the next generation of advanced commercial airliners.

On the night of October 10, 1933, nearly ninety years ago, the skies near Chesterton, Indiana, lit up as a flaming, 10-seater airplane plummeted to the ground. According to Chicago Magazine, residents reported hearing an explosion in the moments leading up to the crash of United Airlines Flight 23. While it was most certainly an explosion that took down the plane, the exact cause of the incident has never been determined. It’s a mystery that’s nearly ninety years old, buried in forgotten FBI files and recounted in faded newspaper headlines. On that autumn afternoon of 1933 - in the days of Chicago gangsters, the waning days of Prohibition and the height of the Great Depression - one of the most advanced and fastest airliners of its time taxied from the United Airlines Terminal at Newark Airport in New Jersey bound ultimately for Oakland, California. The aircraft, a Boeing 247-D, was considered to be the world's first modern airliner. Its all-metal construction, fully cantilevered wings and retractable landing gear revolutionized air transportation when it entered service with United Air Lines in 1933.

This faded photo taken earlier in the year shows "Hal" Tarrant with his mother beside a company aircraft.

On board that state-of-the-art airplane were two young pilots, a 26 year-old flight attendant planing to soon be married and just two passengers. There should have been a third. An executive with the Pierce-Arrow Motor Car Company missed the flight by twenty minutes when his cab driver got lost coming out of the Holland Tunnel from Manhattan. After a brief refueling stop in Cleveland, the plane continued on to Chicago with two additional passengers and a new pilot. Moving into the command seat in Cleveland that afternoon was 25 year-old Harold “Hal” Tarrant, He had been with United for about two years and was considered something of a veteran in a fledgling industry. He was then regarded as one of the best pilots at United. Unlike today’s airliners though, there were no black boxes, no cockpit voice recorders or flight data recorders. And there was no radar to track the plane.

There were about 1,500 navigation beacons across the US, each with a rotating light placed atop a 50-foot tower.

Captain Tarrant checked in by radio at 8:39 PM Central Time. By then, flying in a light rain over North Liberty, Indiana, at an altitude of 1,500 feet, the aircraft was cruising at 180 miles per hour. Tarrant said he could see two navigational beacon lights marking the way ahead, like a white strip on a dark highway.”Everything is okay,” he reported. Twenty minutes later, Tarrant missed his next radio check and the plane was never heard from again. (In the early days of aviation before radar, pilots used ground-based landmarks for guidance. That worked well for daytime flight, but meant pilots couldn't fly at night. Before long, a system of ground-based navigation beacons extended from New York to San Francisco, which assisted pilots in flying across the country at night. At the top of the towers, a rotating beacon with 5,000 candlepower would flash every ten seconds.These were the beacons to which Tarrant referred in his final radio check.)

An explosion had ripped through the plane and within seconds, the entire tail broke off, just forward of the lav.

In the Indiana farming community of Chesterton, Joe Graf was playing a card game of Hearts with Marion Arndt and Johnny Licinski on that Tuesday evening around nine o’clock when they reported hearing “a loud boom” overhead. Running outside, Graf said he could see a yellow light circling down at terrific speed. They knew it was a plane. Just to the south in Valparaiso, George Caprous, the owner of the Bluebird Gas Station, also heard the blast. He recounted seeing a fireball shooting down from the sky. Other witnesses claimed they saw the plane zig-zagging as it made its rapid descent, which has since been thought to be the pilot’s vain attempt to land the aircraft. Tragically, Captain Tarrant, along with his co-pilot, flight attendant Alice Scribner and the four passengers were all killed. While the exact cause of the devastating incident has never been determined, some believe it to be the first instance of airline terrorism.

While flying was more expensive than trains in the early 1930s, Boeing 247 service from Newark proved popular.

At first, it appeared to be a terrible accident at a time when airplane crashes were all too common. A fuel leak, maybe. Structural failure was also suspected. Some believed the plane was struck by lightning or had encountered a meteorite. State police soon discovered puncture holes throughout the remains of the rear lavatory. The airline blankets stored in a cubby in back also had holes blown through them - like shrapnel. To those on the grisly scene, it was clear what had happened - a bomb had taken the aircraft down. The mounting evidence of foul play soon resulted in an FBI investigation, led by Melvin Purvis, head of the Chicago office who later gained fame as the man who gunned down gangster John Dillinger. United, which had invested heavily in its new fleet of Boeing 247s and was vitally interested in finding out if the aircraft were flawed, brought in a top lawyer from New York, Col.William Donovan who would go on to become America’s top spy master as head of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II.

Only 75 Boeing 247s were ever built and United Airlines was the only carrier to fly the favored plane in America.

The investigation ultimately concluded that some kind of explosive device brought down the plane - the first airline bombing in history. But, who was responsible and why? More than 320 pages of microfilmed FBI reports, filed away in Washington and so old they couldn’t at first be found in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, provided some answers, but also added to the mystery. Witnesses have long since passed away and any physical evidence is long gone. Newspaper accounts bear witness to the disaster, but offer few clues. Even today, experts who’ve examined the reports agree that it was almost certainly a bomb which brought down the aircraft, but they can only speculate as to why it occurred. One theory held that a bomb had been planted owing from a labor dispute between pilots and the airline as United pilots had threatened to strike just one month prior to the crash. The dispute was over the carrier’s use of faster planes which would reduce pilot hours. This was soon dismissed as unlikely as the pilots were paid well and had just recently received bonuses.

Gangsters and mobsters were synonymous with Chicago in the 1930s but dismissed as causing the United crash.

A rather scurrilous story published by the Chicago Tribune on page 3 of their November 3 edition reported that a mob gangster - with no malicious intent - hid the bomb in the storage compartment among the blankets to merely rid himself of incriminating evidence in case he was searched upon landing. This theory was proffered in conjunction with another holding that the Chicago Mafia was attempting to assassinate a US Attorney who was infamous for prosecuting mob bootleggers, and was known to make cross-country flights on a regular basis. In fact, the story reported that the arrest of a gangster was imminent. But like all the other theories, there was no documentation to back this up, and the FBI vehemently denied the report.

A dated Chicago postcard shows an airborne Boeing 247 bearing the same N number as the ill-fated United flight.

Attention then turned to the passengers, particularly one Emil Smith and his mysteriously-wrapped package. Newark ticket master R. L. Finan told investigators he saw Smith take the package out of his bag and replace it with a bottle of liquor just after buying his ticket. (He was not permitted to carry his booze on board.) Finan said the package was about the size of a pair of shoes and wrapped in brown paper. Nothing further was seen by him after Smith boarded the aircraft. After the crash, however, the remains of that package were found and while the contents were not disclosed, the Bureau reported it contained only a “benign object” not associated with the explosion or crash. A heavily-damaged rifle found in the crash debris was also determined to have belonged to Smith, who according to family interviews was taking it to Chicago to shoot at a hunt club.

In the end, though, no suspect was ever identified. One by one, each passenger was crossed off the list. The determination that it was sabotage, however, gave United some breathing space. With the company invested so heavily in the B247, the plane's forced grounding resulting from design flaws could have killed the airline. The story gradually faded from the front page. And the FBI lost interest. On Sept. 7, 1935, the new special agent in charge of the Chicago office, D. M. Ladd, wrote that all leads in connection with the investigation had been “completely exhausted.” He requested permission to consider the case closed. It was granted on Sept. 27. The letter was signed by J. Edgar Hoover.

Until next time...safe travels.