TRAPPED IN FOG

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 952, 21 April 1930, Page 1

TRAPPED IN FOG

AIRPLANE HITS WIRES AND KILLS FIVE VICTIMS ELECTROCUTED United P.A.—By Telegraph—Copyright NEW YORK, Saturday. Five lives were lost last evening in a tragic flying accident near Jersey City. Count Henri de la Vaulx, president of the Aeronautique Internationale of Paris, and three other occupants of a passenger airplane en route from Albany, New York, to Newark, as well as the pilot, were electrocuted when the a group of high tension wires. The airplane was enveloped in flames and crashed to the ground. The pilot, Salway, served with the Royal Air Force in the Great War. Terror-stricken onlookers for half an hour had watched the great Fairchild monoplane, trapped in a fog, swoop blindly among the roof-tops. Then the machine turned toward some neighbouring meadows and struck the high-tension wires. One of the ill-fated passengers was a woman. Count de la Vaulx had chartered the monoplane at Montreal in order to spend Easter at New York after the completion of a 40,000-mile air tour in North and South America. The Count was wearing evening dress and on his coat was pinned a ribbon of the Legion of Honour. The removal of the victims from the wreckage was rendered difficult by the darkness. The crash into the wires extinguished all the lights in Hudson County, New Jersey.