Forgotten 707 Crash in Boeing’s Backyard

Introduction to Scotland

0:00Expedia and VisitScotland invite you to come step into centuries of history that await in Scotland. Castles steeped in legend walk along cobblestone streets. Come share the warmth of stories passed down through generations. This is a place with a past that is fully present today and all yours to explore. Plan your Scottish escape today at Expedia.com slash VisitScotland.

Daredevil Promotion

0:30Where is Daredevil a minor? Don't miss the return of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again. So what's next?

0:40We're gonna take this city back. In an all new season now streaming only on Disney+. They're hunting us. It's time we started hunting them. I can work with them.

0:53This should be tons of fun.

Unsolved Histories Introduction

1:00Felix Bunnell here, producer and host of Unsolved Histories. The Unsolved Histories podcast began with a deep dive on an airliner that disappeared on the way to Alaska. And where I live in the Pacific Northwest, there are many, many stories about aviation from the past century. This is Boeing's backyard, after all. In this episode, we go back to the dawn of the jet age and we look into an unusual crash of a Boeing jetliner that happened not far from Seattle. It's unusual for many reasons, not the least of which is that it's been pretty much completely forgotten.

1:34But it's also an example of the challenges of an emerging technology and a pretty powerful and timeless story of human survival.

1:45I don't know if you've ever known you were gonna die, but somehow you get a euphoric feeling. You know, don't worry about it. Everything's gonna be alright. That's Albert Pete Krause. It was about 4.20 p.m. on a Monday, high above a lake in the Cascade Mountains north of Seattle, when Pete knew he was about to die. Hurry up. Let's get it over with. That's sort of the attitude I had, anyway.

2:15I think it's a wonderful feeling. And I don't know how to explain it. Pete had these thoughts as he was hanging on to a seatbelt in the back of a Boeing 707 one autumn day in 1959.

Pete Krause's Story

2:37Pete was a 28-year-old father of five from Texas. He was a military vet with a good job as a flight engineer for Braniff Airlines. The 707 is the original four-engine jetliner that put Boeing on the map and which revolutionized commercial air travel. 1959. This was the year the 707 first made its mark in the skies, and some of the miles between men were dissolved in vapor. For this was the 707, year one. It was seven years earlier when Boeing took a huge financial risk to design and build a single prototype to serve two very different kinds of customers with two completely separate models of aircraft.

3:20One would become the KC-135 jet tanker for the military, and one became the 707 jetliner for civilian passenger travel. And these were the makers of the jets. They could look back on seven years of work leading to this year one. Now they were building for the airlines of 11 nations. By creating what was essentially a two-for-one prototype, Boeing hedged its bet. Still, the project was a daring, brilliant, and expensive move that could have bankrupted the company.

3:51This is it. The first American commercial jet capable of economical transatlantic service. The Boeing 707 jet clipper.

Boeing 707 History

4:00First to go aboard cargo and mail. By 1959, the big bet was paying off for Boeing. It was also paying off for airlines like Pan Am and Braniff who had purchased the 707 and begun to replace their propeller planes with jets. But on an October day in that debut year, the odds for this particular aircraft were not in anyone's favor. Eight men from Boeing, Braniff Airlines, and the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration, were aboard the 707 when it left Boeing Field in Seattle.

4:36It was what's called a customer guarantee and acceptance training flight prior to delivery of the plane to Braniff. That's a routine step when an airline takes delivery of an airliner. You buy an airplane from a company like Boeing or Airbus or any of those others, and they furnish the initial training for the pilots that are going to train the company pilots. And that's what we were up there doing, getting checked out on the 707. For Pete Krause, it ended up being anything but routine.

5:08Just minutes into the flight, a 32-year-old Boeing pilot named Russ Baum executed a common training maneuver used for teaching pilots how to address something called a Dutch roll. When a Dutch roll is happening, the aircraft rolls or tips from side to side, and the plane fishtails back and forth. Mild Dutch rolls during flight were common in early jetliners like the 707. But the Dutch rolls that Russ Baum was creating were steeper and more extreme than what was allowed during Boeing training flights.

5:40And he says, Russ, listen, you're pushing it. You're exceeding the limits. I think that's what he, if my number is correct, that's what he said. You're exceeding the overall limits. It was the other Boeing pilot aboard the jet, Bill Alsop, who told Russ Baum to knock it off. And I remember he just sloughed it off, you know, and said, no, don't worry about it. Sitting next to Baum at the other set of controls was Braniff pilot Jack Burke. Burke was learning how to steady the jet and take it safely out of the Dutch rolls that Baum was intentionally creating.

6:12For some reason, nobody knows why, Baum continued to ignore the Boeing rules and the warnings from the other Boeing pilot. One of Baum's maneuvers caused the jet to roll so steeply that its wings were tipped as far as 60 degrees off of horizontal. It might be hard to picture that, but were this a regular flight with passengers and flight attendants on board, this steep roll would have been terrifying. Anyone not belted in would likely have been injured. It was during this extreme roll when Braniff pilot Jack Burke made a big mistake.

6:47You know, Jack, he's a good guy, but he just, I don't know. For some reason, Jack Burke pushed the left foot pedal instead of the pedal on the right. The pedals controlled the flaps on the tail, and his move put the 707 into a steep snap roll toward the right. Instead of correcting the Dutch roll, the jet rolled farther to the right and the wings were perpendicular to the ground. Pete was in the cockpit and watching all of this from the engineer's seat. He knew right away that they were in trouble.

7:19I saw that left knee go down, and I thought, oh boy, here we go. The brand new 707 was about to become the center of a significant, tragic milestone. Now mostly forgotten in the long story of the Boeing Airplane Company. From KSL Podcasts, I'm Felix Bunnell. This is Unsolved Histories Season 2, Episode 3, The Forgotten 707 Crash. Could AI help you do more of what you love?

7:50Workday is the AI platform for HR and finance that actually knows your business. We help you handle the have-to-dos so you can focus on the can't-wait-to-dos. It's a new Workday.

Boeing's Recent Troubles

8:01The Boeing Company has struggled lately with quality control issues. Two deadly crashes of the 737 MAX. A door plug falling off a jetliner over Portland, Oregon. Not to mention strikes and other disruptions in its workforce. Some political leaders and aviation analysts, and even airline passengers themselves, have begun to wonder about the company's future. Looking back, it's no overstatement to say Boeing built its commercial jet empire

8:34on the success of the 707 beginning in the 1950s. And it's fair to say that, even with the recent troubles, the DNA of the company's earliest jetliner is present today in its newest and most advanced models. Still, it's easy to forget that the program had setbacks along the way, like what Pete Krause was faced with over Lake Kavanaugh more than 65 years ago. Good afternoon, folks. Joe Donnelly speaking.

9:04On behalf of the Boeing Airplane Company and the personnel of the Renton Plant, it's my privilege to welcome our guest today. The 707 debuted to great fanfare with a big public ceremony in May 1954 at the Boeing plant in Renton, south of Seattle. They call those events rollouts because they literally roll the new plane out of the factory while the crowd looks on.

9:35Boeing CEO William Allen was on hand, plus the Renton High School marching band and about 8,000 Boeing employees. Thank you, Joe. Friends and fellow employees, this is a most significant day in the history of the Boeing Airplane Company. In this rare audio from the rollout that I dubbed from a one-of-a-kind old vinyl record years ago, William Allen spoke first. As we prepare to roll out the first jet-powered transport

10:07to be built in America, we still must sell the airplane.

10:15Having achieved that goal, we must initiate a construction program which will demand the best in skill and ingenuity that the Boeing organization possesses. I have faith that we will achieve these goals. In this scratchy old recording, we then hear the Boeing CEO introduce a man who hadn't been directly involved with the company for 20 years. Courage and vision certainly were needed in those early days.

10:50It was someone who had left Boeing in bitterness after the government broke up the company into separate entities, taking away Boeing's engine manufacturing operations and Boeing's passenger travel operations, which became United Airlines. Certainly, this occasion is made more meaningful by having with us today the founder of our company. The man that William Allen introduced at the rollout was none other than the company's founder and namesake, Mr. Bill Boeing himself.

11:20It is with the greatest of pleasure that I present to you the founder of our company, Mr. W. E. Boeing.

11:31Applause erupted and then quickly subsided. Bill Boeing was in his early 70s. He acknowledged the introduction, but he never actually spoke at the rollout. Bill Boeing would pass away of natural causes on his yacht just two years later. But Bill's wife Bertha was there, and she rose to the occasion.

11:51Mr. Boeing, would you please christen the airplane? And just as she'd done for one of the company's first planes back in the 1920s, Bertha did the same honors for the 707, wielding a bottle of champagne. Today, I'm really christening twins, since this airplane has several possible uses. I christen thee the airplane of tomorrow, the Boeing jet strato tanker, strato lining. If you listen carefully,

12:22you can hear the bottle of champagne shattering against the side of the jet. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That gamble to create a prototype for a civilian jet and a military jet in a single aircraft was a brilliant move that would pay off beyond anyone's wildest dreams. The prototype was officially known as the Dash 80. After the May 1954 rollout, it became a common sight in the skies over Seattle that summer. These were heady times when jet travel

12:54was about more than just getting from one place to another. The jet era is opening the doors for the intermingling of various cultures, a prelude to the demolition of barriers erected by lack of contact and by prejudice. No land is now isolated. No people sheltered from the friendly gaze of others. In 1955, the prototype wowed a crowd in Seattle with a move captured on film, which would later become a YouTube staple. It was during the summer festival called Seafing,

13:24A Boeing test pilot named Tex Johnston barrel rolled the jet twice as it flew over tens of thousands of people gathered on Lake Washington for the annual boat races. During a barrel roll, the jet moves like the path of a corkscrew. That is, the wings do a complete 360-degree roll as the aircraft moves forward. Tex Johnston did it twice, showing just how nimble and tough the Dash 80 was. Seafare fans took notice. So did the military and the airline industry.

13:56The military ordered tankers and then Pan Am ordered the civilian jetliner version, the Boeing 707. Other airlines quickly followed suit, including Branagh. The age of jet travel was officially here and Boeing's big bet had paid off.

14:16Pete Krause was a flight engineer and a military pilot who flew fighter jets in the Korean War. He was in the cockpit of the 707 learning from Boeing pilots how to operate the aircraft before it officially joined the Braniff fleet. On that October day, 12,000 feet above Lake Cavanaugh, Russ Baum was the Boeing pilot who caused the problem during the Dutch roll exercises. And it was Baum who then tried to save the day after Braniff pilot Jack Burke pressed the wrong pedal. And I don't know if you know anything about aviation,

14:48but if you want to spin an aircraft, you get a going runway and you jam in a full opposite rudder and pull a little back out of the stick, it'll spin on you. And that's basically what happened. We snap rolled it. That's what we did. Baum tried to stop the roll to the right by jamming the controls to the left. Unfortunately, creating that snap roll was not the best move. When Baum jammed those controls, the wings swung so violently back to the left that the stress on the pylons,

15:19that's the critical part of the jet that connects the engines to the wings, was too much. The snap roll did just that. It made two of the 707's engines snap right off. The one and four separated from the aircraft. Number three was still intact, but it was stuck at 80%. By one and four, Pete means engine number one and engine number four. One is on the outer portion of the left wing. Four is on the outer portion of the right wing. The whiplash-like force of the snap roll

15:50snapped the pylons and ripped those two engines from the wings. They fell away and plummeted to the ground. As Pete says, the number three engine, that's on the right wing nearest the fuselage, was still attached, but it was running at only 80% power and it couldn't be controlled from the cockpit. But that wasn't the worst of it. It was the condition of engine number two, that's the engine nearest the fuselage, on the left side, that doomed the jet. Engine number two was still attached, but its pylon was badly damaged.

16:21And number two, it broke, the pylon broke, and the engine, the front end of it fell down. And when it did that, it pulled the bottom of the fuel tank out, and that fuel hit that hot, hot jet engine, and it ignited that left wing. So, not much to get news. All of this happened in a matter of seconds. The Boeing 707, the same kind of plane that wowed a crowd in Seattle with its two barrel rolls, was no match for a snap roll.

16:53At that point, Pete Krause knew then that there was nothing anyone could do to save the doomed jetliner. All the circuit breakers had popped, and nothing was working. With the circuit breakers popped, as Pete says, no systems or controls that required electricity were working in the cockpit. Except we had elevators for just a little while, but that must have burned through or something, because we lost that.

17:18The elevators that Pete says they had for just a little while are the flaps on the tail, one of the most basic parts on an airplane going back almost to the days of the Wright brothers. On most jetliners, they're like flat pieces of aluminum that hinge up and down to help control the plane's ascent and descent. Then all they had was the rudder trim. The rudder trim is a small, adjustable surface on the tail that, under normal circumstances, helps keep the plane flying straight. It's not really substantial enough

17:50to steer a big jet, especially a big jet with only one engine working and a wing on fire. Despite all those problems, Pete Krause says he witnessed Boeing pilot Russ Baum trying to save the plane. I heard somebody say, well, there's a bomb, I assume it was him, and said, I lost elevators, and that was when I left. Pete knew it was time to get out of the cockpit. Just hanging around here, it's not going to be any fun up here at all. They hit first. As a veteran Marine Corps

18:20combat pilot and survivor of what he calls a couple of bad scrapes, Pete knew that the best thing for him to do was to head as far back into the passenger cabin of the jet as possible. But it wasn't easy to get there. The 707 was plummeting out of control from 12,000 feet at a steep 45-degree angle. This steep angle was nothing like a passenger would experience on a regular flight. This was more like a dive bomber or a fighter plane. You know, I pulled myself up by grabbing the backs of the seats, you know, as I went by.

18:51They would go forward partly, but they won't go all the way forward. That's how I sort of crawled my way back, pulling on those and dragging myself up. As Boeing pilot Russ Baum wrestled to try and bring the damaged and burning jet under control and to find a place to put it down, three other men stayed with him in the cockpit. Along with Baum were Boeing flight engineer George Hagen and Braniff pilots Frank Staley and Jack Burke. Remember, Jack is a guy who'd made the mistake when trying to correct the too-steep Dutch roll.

19:22As he was crawling away from the cockpit and the 707 was getting closer and closer to the ground, Pete could hear the men struggling to get the damaged jet under control. I remember Jack Burke started to do something and Russ Baum hollered at him, you've done enough already and I'll just sit there and shut up. Along with Pete Krause, three other men made their way to the very back of the plane, Boeing pilot Bill Alsop, the FAA employee and a fellow Braniff flight engineer. Pete was determined to reach one of the two

19:53side-by-side jump seats in the back of the 707 where flight attendants sit during takeoffs and landings. But the other Braniff engineer had made it there first and was already sitting in one of them. And something wasn't quite right. When I got there, though, the Braniff engineer had used bulk seatbelts to hook him in so there was no seatbelt for me to hang on to. We all know we're going to die, but like I said, I was grateful for I had a little

20:24minute or two to, you know, repent of my sins, so to speak, and say, God, here I come. And you get the feeling that says, come on aboard.

20:40Investigators later said that in those final moments while Pete was praying and hanging on for dear life, Baum and the others in the cockpit considered ditching the jetliner in Lake Kavanaugh. That is, landing it on the surface of the water. But the 707 was losing altitude too fast and too many systems had been compromised or had failed. Pete couldn't see where they were headed, but he heard everything as the 707 first clipped a stand of trees. Everyone's thinking, boy, I'm getting beat up pretty good here. I can't take much more of that.

21:11And then slammed into the ground.

21:20Pete blacked out. When he came to, it was quiet. He was beat up pretty good, but he was alive. Pete was still in the rear section of the 707 and everything had come to a hard stop. As would be determined later by investigators, Russ Baum had managed to guide the crippled jetliner to a spot along the bank of the Stillaguamish River and then make a crash landing on the glacial sand and gravel. As the plane

21:50struck the riverbank, the cockpit and forward section separated from the rear section. The forward section slid and bounced another 50 yards past where the rear section had come to a stop. Well, when I woke up, I looked out that little window on the door and all I could see was gravel. Pete tried to exit the crippled jet by the rear door, but the fuselage had rolled onto its side, pinning the door closed. I thought, oh no, probably burned to death here. Pete didn't yet know that the rear section

22:20had separated from the rest of the plane. And I was still groggy, but I remember the disappointment I had when I saw that gravel. That's when Pete realized he wouldn't need a door to get out of the jet and get to safety. Then Bill Alsop hollered, it's open up here and that's why I crawled out. Boeing pilot Bill Alsop, Pete Krause and the other two men who had gone to the rear of the plane before the crash, had miraculously survived. They got out through the opening created when the rear section was torn away

22:51from the rest of the jet.

22:55Those other four men aboard the flight, the men in the cockpit who had tried everything to bring the plane down safely, were not so lucky. The forward section of the 707, including the cockpit, was almost completely destroyed by the fire and by the impact of the crash. Boeing pilot Russ Baum and three other men, including Pete's colleagues from Braniff, four people who Pete had been with in the cockpit just moments earlier, were dead.

23:24I broke a couple vertebrae and I could walk and I crawled out of the airplane. As badly injured as Pete was, he was alive and he could move. It was right in a shallow river there. It was very shallow. And I made it to the other side out to the bank and then I collapsed. I couldn't really make it in any further without help. Pete remained conscious. The effort he'd made to crawl to the rear of the plane and to hang on to a seatbelt probably meant

23:55the difference between life and death. If it hadn't broken off, we would have been killed. We'd probably burned to death and I sure didn't want to do that. That's a hard way to go. Local volunteer firefighters were on the scene in minutes. Pete and the other three survivors were put on stretchers and carried from the riverbank to the nearby highway. They were then transported by ambulance to hospitals 20 miles away in the city of Everett. As the ambulances pulled away, lights flashing and sirens blaring,

24:25the forward section of the 707 was still smoldering along the riverbank.

24:34This spring, Uber Eats has you covered. Whether you're celebrating mom, dad, or your favorite grad, not all of us are great planners and with the Uber Eats gift hub, you don't have to be. Send flowers, perfume, champagne, or just their favorite meal straight to their door. Gifts arrive in as little as 25 minutes and you can add a personalized video message for that additional so-not-last-minute touch. So this spring, get a leg up on gift-giving with Uber Eats. Last-minute gifts that land every time. Must be 21 or older to purchase alcohol. Product availability varies per region. See app for details.

25:04This episode is brought to you by Tidy Cats. Here to level up your litter game with their new Performance Plus lineup. Your home is your happy place. Your cats, VIPs. So when it comes to the litter box, excellence isn't optional. Choose from products that specialize in max power clumping, low tracking, or odor fighting so advanced, stink won't see it coming. Tidy Cats Performance Plus. Mission mighty, keep it tidy. Shop now at TidyCats.com.

Ron Palmer's Story

25:37I always wanted to be a naval aviator. I never made it.

25:42But that was my passion. I still like airplanes. I go to air shows when they have them around.

25:51Sitting at the kitchen table of his split-level house on a cul-de-sac east of Seattle, it's clear that Ron Palmer has been excited about airplanes since he was a kid. My dad was passionate. He used to run up to Payne Field when the blimps would come in. And maybe that's where I get it from. Dad was passionate about airplanes. He worked at Boeing, although he would never fly. But he worked there and he loved it there. He was very proud of what he did there. Just like his dad, Ron worked for Boeing too. He retired after

26:21assembling Boeing jets for 40 years. So maybe it was makes perfect sense that when he heard about the 707 crash in October 1959, Ron Palmer had to go the very next day and see it for himself. I said, I got to see that. And I did. And that's just me. Along with his deep interest in aviation, Ron is also a photographer. Well, I was working swing-shifted Boeing, started work about 3 o'clock, so I had time. I told my wife, grab the camera, and up we go.

26:52And the freeway wasn't there then. So we had to go up 99 through Everett. No stop signs, you know, pretty much. It took more than an hour for Ron and his wife to get to the crash site east of the town of Oso along the Stillaguamish River. We boogied up to Oso, found this crash site. There was a police car on the side of the road, but he pulled up behind him. He didn't say anything to me. I don't even know if he was there, but I walked right across Farmer Brown's field.

27:22I could see the tip of the tail sitting out there. That's when Ron started snapping photos. And sometimes they block it all off. Nowadays, you can't get close to anything, so I was fortunate to walk right up to the river's edge there. It was on kind of a berm or a dike or something. The images Ron captured are not like the photos you might see in the newspaper after a crash. They're raw and startling and feel like something you're not supposed to see.

27:53Ron's photos aren't gruesome exactly, but they do pull back the curtain in some surprising ways. Wish it had been color, wish they'd been bigger, and I don't think I was there more than 10 minutes. In one photo, a man can be seen using a paint roller on a long extension handle to paint over the Brandniff logo on the jetliner's vertical stabilizer or tail. Painting over logos was standard practice after a crash in order to protect the airline's brand. In this case, maybe it was considered especially important.

28:24The 707 hadn't yet been officially handed over from Boeing to Brandniff. In another of Ron's photos, the burned-out remains of the forward section, including the cockpit where the four men died, can be seen along the river. More than a half century after it happened, lifelong aviation enthusiast Ron Palmer, still vividly recalls details he saw at the scene of the crash. But I remember looking up in the trees and you could see where he had come down and cut the trees off, the tops.

28:54They were all broken off. Oh, maybe 50, 70 feet high. Ironically, the Boeing 707 that crashed had already been photographed for Brandniff marketing materials. The images were used by the airline on postcards and posters for years after the jetliner had been destroyed. Though the crash was front-page news in Seattle, Ron says he doesn't recall a lot of other media coverage at the time. You know, the press really, I think, as I recall anyway, they kind of

29:24cut Boeing some slack at times and just didn't put it out there too much. It's been forgotten. But yeah, it was a big deal. It was a big deal for us at Boeing because we lost the product and gosh, did we do something wrong? You know, there's so many checks and balances and but no, we didn't do anything wrong. It happened up there in their flight. Somebody did something wrong in the flight and so yeah, it was a big deal then

29:54but it was a big deal to me because I'm an aircraft nut. The 707 was new in 1959 and even a guy like Ron Palmer working in the factory and assembling aircraft was aware that the company's future was riding on the jetliner's success. The crash, Ron says, was significant for everyone at Boeing. Rival company Douglas had recently introduced a similar jetliner called the DC-8. It was a big deal because we were in competition with Douglas who had a great product out there in the DC-8.

30:26Ron took pictures that day but didn't share them with anybody for decades. He's not sure why. I kept them in the house and you know I didn't didn't talk to anybody about them they were just mine and then as years go by we moved and I thought the pictures were gone and here several years ago I was going through stuff and I came across them. Ron says that nowadays nobody he talks to remembers the 1959 707 crash.

30:57He says some people even doubt whether it really happened. Ron says he has proof. But everybody I talked to about it says no no that didn't happen we never heard about it you know well I it did happen there it is.

31:14The spot where Ron Palmer drove to see the crash is just off State Route 530 a two-lane highway through a rural area in the Cascade foothills. Okay so it's milepost 32 boy it's busy traffic we're looking to the south across highway 530 you can see the mountain that's clear in the pictures that Ron Palmer took the day after the crash. It's near a town called Oso if that sounds familiar it might be because a deadly landslide

31:44killed more than 50 people there in 2014. Like the crash site the place where the landslide happened is also along the banks of the Stillaguamish River. The locations are about two miles apart. I paid a visit to the crash site with my brother in 2024 but we couldn't get as close as Ron Palmer did. The trees are all grown up there's a sign that says private property no park access and a big German shepherd wandering around so we're not going to cross over the private property to get a better view and the map is unclear where the actual

32:15public property is to get river access so we're going to drive around the back way go through go into Oso proper and turn right and cross over and see if there's a way to get on the south side of the river. The south side of the river is mostly horse farms and houses on big pieces of property. There are rolling fields between the river and a ridge of foothills to the south. There are no public access points to reach the river near the crash site but we did manage to get down to the water by cutting through brush alongside a bridge.

32:46It's like a river looks like this actually is like a river channel when the water's high. Where we reached the river was still a ways upstream from where the 707 had crashed but the look and feel of the landscape was probably pretty similar. So lots of river rock. I mean this is like classic northwest riverbank geography, geology, topography, all those kinds of words like that.

33:10I mean I guess 65 years later there's not going to be any evidence of the trees that clipped on the way down. There won't be any evidence of anything on the ground. Without getting permission from the private landowners along that part of the river, reaching the site where the 707 went down in order to take a closer look would be challenging to say the least. Looks like it'd be pretty tricky to actually march down the side of the river unless you had hip waders and... One thing being near the crash site makes abundantly clear is the effort made by the volunteer firefighters who were first

33:41on the scene in 1959. They did whatever was necessary to get to Pete Krause and the other survivors and then carry them back to the highway. Several days after the 707 went down, Pete headed home to Texas. He took a few months off from work to recuperate and went to physical therapy three times a week just to get back on his feet. Pete says he wasn't bitter about his injuries and didn't feel that he was owed anything other than what he'd lost and the chance to return to work for Braniff.

34:13I remember these service guys came out and said, what do you want? I said, I want my clothes back. I had $20 in my coat pocket