page_title: Carole Lombard
section_title: Death
hierarchical_section_title: Carole Lombard / Death
caption_attribution_description: Composite of two screenshots showing 1.Carole Lombard signing autograph and 2. Lombard with Will Hays and Governor of Indiana, H. F Schricker. Both taken on January 15, 1942 during a war bonds tour in Indianopolis
context_page_description: Carole Lombard was an American actress, particularly noted for her energetic, often off-beat roles in screwball comedies. She was the highest-paid star in Hollywood in the late 1930s and in 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Lombard 23rd on its list of the greatest female stars of Classic Hollywood Cinema.
  Lombard was born into a wealthy family in Fort Wayne, Indiana, but was raised in Los Angeles by her single mother. At 12, she was recruited by director Allan Dwan and made her screen debut in A Perfect Crime. Eager to become an actress, she signed a contract with the Fox Film Corporation at age 16, but mainly played bit parts. She was dropped by Fox just before her 18th birthday after a shattered windshield from a car accident left a scar on her face. Lombard appeared in fifteen short comedies for Mack Sennett between 1927 and 1929, and then began appearing in feature films such as High Voltage and The Racketeer. After a successful appearance in The Arizona Kid, she was signed to a contract with Paramount Pictures.
  Paramount quickly began casting Lombard as a leading lady, primarily in drama films.
context_section_description: When the U.S. entered World War II at the end of 1941, Lombard traveled to her home state of Indiana for a war bond rally with her mother, Bess Peters, and Clark Gable's press agent, Otto Winkler. Lombard was able to raise over $2 million in defense bonds in a single evening. Her party had initially been scheduled to return to Los Angeles by train, but Lombard was anxious to reach home more quickly and wanted to fly by a scheduled airline. Her mother and Winkler were both afraid of flying and insisted they follow their original travel plans. Lombard suggested they flip a coin; they agreed and Lombard won the toss.
  In the early morning hours of January 16, 1942, Lombard, her mother, and Winkler boarded a Transcontinental and Western Air Douglas DST (Douglas Sleeper Transport) aircraft to return to California. After refueling in Las Vegas, TWA Flight 3 took off at 7:07 p.m. and crashed into "Double Up Peak" near the 8,300-foot (2,530 m) level of Potosi Mountain, 32 statute miles (51 km) southwest of the Las Vegas airport. All 22 aboard, including Lombard, her mother, and 15 U.S. Army soldiers, were killed instantly. Lombard was only 33 years old. The cause of the crash was determined to be linked to the pilot and crew's inability to properly navigate over the mountains surrounding Las Vegas.  As a precaution against the possibility of enemy Japanese bomber aircraft coming into American airspace from the Pacific, safety beacons used to direct night flights were turned off, leaving the pilot and crew of the TWA flight without visual warnings of the mountains in their flight path. The crash on the mountainside occurred three miles outside of Las Vegas.
caption: Lombard in Indiana, January 1942, shortly before her death in a plane crash
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0.1 Macintosh", "Image DateTime": "2008:10:28 23:23:25", "Image ExifOffset": "176", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "314", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "3963", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "186", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "283"}