Talk:1931 Transcontinental & Western Air Fokker F-10 crash

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Sbmeirow (talk) 18:35, 19 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Important Notes Before Editing This Article 

message: According to Civil Aeronautics Authority and , the CAA was not created until 1938.  So how can it have investigated this crash? FiggyBee 12:55, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Okay, I read some of the external links and they say it was the Aeronautics Branch of the US Department of Commerce, so that's enough for me to make the change. FiggyBee 13:01, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Civil Aeronautics Authority 

message: This article states: "who was on his way to Los Angeles for the film The Spirit of Notre Dame." Go to see it? Consult on its filming? Act in it? Direct it? Produce it? Buy a print of it? What exactly was he going to do in LA with respect to this movie?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.158.61.144 (talk) 20:25, 21 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Missing Info 

message: The title of this article, and all references to it from other articles, has been wrong for years and needs to be changed. (Wish I'd gotten around to this before it ended up in the main page's "On This Day".) TWA did not have a "Flight 599" in 1931. Looking at two of its 1931 timetables (here and here) shows no three-digit flight numbers at all. Most flights have one-digit numbers, with a few being numbered in the teens.
Assuming the flight number in this article was somehow garbled rather than simply made up, Flight 5 (in the second timetable I linked) seems most likely. It matches the location and general time of day of the crash. It should be possible to confirm this from a published source.
--Colin Douglas Howell (talk) 01:52, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: I think your logic is sound. I'd say go to the Article and rename/move it (click the down arrow by the search box). The worst they can do is yell at you!--Jim in Georgia Contribs Talk  18:13, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Support I support renaming.  It looks to me like the research is in place and I see no reason at this time to do anything but assume good faith.--Paul McDonald (talk) 21:00, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: At least one book refers to this as TWA Flight 5 , yet another Flight 591 . Inconclusive, though 5 makes the best sense. JNW (talk) 21:34, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  This article's title is wrong—TWA had no "Flight 599" in 1931. 

message: Despite the request (#2) at the top of the text of this page, a considerable portion of this article, especially the "Aircraft design and technology" section, reads like promotional material.  The repeated use of "of all time" is also quite un-encyclopedic.  Please, enough of the rah-rah business. --Piledhigheranddeeper (talk) 17:25, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tone 

message: This article's title, and the fictitious flight number it repeatedly references (which is also referenced in many other places on Wikipedia), has been galling at me for years, but I could never motivate myself to make the effort to thoroughly fix it.
Well, I've finally done it. I've removed the completely erroneous "Flight 599" designation from this article and from every other article on the English Wikipedia where I could find it. (That still leaves some non-English ones, alas.)
Before doing so, I added a footnote to this article's lede explaining the situation, which I'll repeat here:
Although many recent sources refer to this as "Flight 599" (for example, page 35 of College Football's Great Dynasties: Notre Dame by Roland Lazenby, published in 1991), this seems to be a corruption; older sources, along with other recent sources, refer to it as "Flight 5" (an older example is page 127 of The Only Way to Fly: the Story of Western Airlines, America's Senior Air Carrier by Robert J. Serling, published in 1976). Transcontinental & Western Air's own timetables from this period have no "Flight 599" or any flight numbers with more than two digits, and its transcontinental flights all have one-digit numbers, as can be seen in Airline Timetable Images' scans of T&WA's February 1, 1931 and April 20, 1931 timetables. The latter timetable includes a "Flight No. 5" with the same route and schedule as the flight which crashed.
From looking at where I could first find references to this flight as "Flight 599" rather than "Flight 5", it looks like the misinformation may have started with sports historians who didn't know or care enough to check this bit of data; possibly someone mixed up the actual flight number and the aircraft's registration number.
After I edited this article to remove references to "Flight 599" and moved it to a new title (following the "<year> <airline> <aircraft type> crash" pattern used for other articles on early airline crashes), I then scrubbed every article reference to "Flight 599" I could find, changing them to point directly to the new article title and rewording them to not include a flight number.
I'll admit this is a drastic step, but this has been allowed to linger far too long, poisoning many other sites with this misinformation. (It doesn't help that the same misinformation already exists in some printed sources predating Wikipedia, so the poisoning can persist...)
I chose the generic pattern for the new article title for two reasons. One is that while I am certain that the flight was not "Flight 599", I'm not totally certain it was Flight 5 either. Transcontinental & Western Air adjusted their flight numbering scheme between the two timetables which precede and follow the crash; in the pre-crash timetable, "Flight 5" is a Los Angeles-San Francisco flight, while in the post-crash timetable, it's a transcontinental one.
The other reason is that during this early period, when airlines offered a relatively small number of flights and the news media doesn't seem to have treated the flight number as important information for a crash, flight numbers appear to me to be a poor way to distinguish crashes, even for a single airline. This is particularly true for this crash, even if it was "Flight 5". Just four years later, in 1935, another crash of a TWA Flight 5, though not as famous as the Knute Rockne crash, would be arguably as important in its effects on U.S. civil aviation: the DC-2 crash which killed Senator Bronson M. Cutting of New Mexico. That crash revealed serious weaknesses in TWA's operations, leading to a congressional committee and the eventual establishment of the Civil Aeronautics Authority, the immediate predecessor to the Civil Aeronautics Administration and the Civil Aeronautics Board, which together would regulate U.S. civil aviation for the next few decades. (For some reason, a Wikipedia article has never been created for the Bronson Cutting crash, an oversight which really should be remedied.)
--Colin Douglas Howell (talk) 10:21, 15 September 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: My second reason for avoiding flight numbers for naming crashes included the statement that another important crash, the crash which killed Bronson M. Cutting, was also a TWA Flight 5. This turned out to be wrong; that crash was TWA Flight 6. (Currently there is no Wikipedia article for it.) --Colin Douglas Howell (talk) 22:11, 15 October 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  I've finally given this article a suitable, accurate title. 

message: Though I've fixed the problem with the incorrect flight number, this article has a whole bunch of other problems. It seems to me that it really needs to be thoroughly checked over and rewritten. It doesn't have to be restarted from scratch, but it has lots of uncited claims, poorly structured and organized information, a lack of detail about the flight and the crash itself, remarks about the cause of the crash that may be incorrect and are at least incomplete, and too much detail about future aircraft developments, only some of which resulted from the Fokker crash. (I don't feel up to cataloguing all the problems at the moment; these are just my impressions from scanning the article.)
This is an important crash, and it deserves better article quality from us. So I've added another maintenance tag.
High-quality published sources (preferably with an aviation focus, as opposed to sports-history sources) would be preferred of course, but the following links may also be helpful in this regard: the page on the crashed aircraft at the Grand Central Air Terminal website, and more importantly, a scan of a summary document of the accident investigation, linked to from the previously mentioned web page.
--Colin Douglas Howell (talk) 14:32, 15 September 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  This article still needs a thorough overhaul. 

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