OCR Text |
Show Radio Mixup Seen in Fatal Crash WASHINGTON, Nor. U (UP) The Washington airport control tower chief said Friday that a Bolivian pilot' emergency landing request shortly before last week's air disaster may have been jammed because the tower was trying to transmit at ths same time oa the same radio frequency. - This possibility was raised by Stanley Seltasr as a civil aeronautics aeronau-tics board panel sought to sstab-ltsh sstab-ltsh what caused the Nov. 1 air collision and crash which killed 99 persons aboard an - Eastern . Air Lines pees linger plane. Third Day ' For the third day of pubHe hearings hear-ings ths CAB panel waa trying to piece together a Jig-saw pussle of conflicting' testimony about history's his-tory's worst airplane . tragedy. Erick Rioe Bridoux, Sols survivor of ths crash, said in a sworn statement state-ment from his hospital bed that shortly before his P-3S rammed into ths transport hs told ths tower he was having engine trouble. He said he got no reply from the tower. Tower officials have sworn that they nevsr received re-ceived any such report Seltzer explained that with the communications system employed at the airport lt would be quite possible for a control tower officer offi-cer to miss a landing request from a plans. Under the so-called "Simplex" system both tower and plans transmit on ths same frequency. fre-quency. , Blocks Oat This means,' Seltser aaid, that when a control tower operator preese a button to transmit hs block out any simultaneous message mes-sage from ths plana Rioe told government Investigators Investi-gators on Tuesday that hs got no Immediate reply when he reported engine trouble and asked landing instructions. Hs said hs did not gst landing clearance until he had MnU tK Immt Apparently with the unanswered request in mind, Robert W. Chrisp, presiding officer of the inquiry board, drew from Seltzer a statement state-ment that It was "quit possible" thst a radio meesags from the P-3S. could have been blocked out |