San Francisco Chronicle, February 14, 1948 (page 9, col. 5)
Los Angeles, Feb. 13 -- The Airline Transport Carriers, Inc., plane crash which crashed near Coalinga January 28, killing 32 persons was not the ship company had intended using on that particular flight, witnesses testified at today's hearing before a Civil Aeronautics Board in Santa Monica.
All aboard were killed. They included 28 Mexican nationals, A U.S. Immigration guard, the pilot, co-pilot and stewardess.
Both Charles C. Sherman, president of the line, and Harry Conover, chief pilot, said Captain Francis Charles Atkinson and First Officer Marion Harlow Ewing had flown the wrong ship from Burbank.
They were supposed, Sherman said to use the plane due at Burbank from Las Vegas.
Instead they took off in another ship of the same type which was waiting to be given it regular 100-hour checkup. This checkup already was seven hours overdue.
Conover said he did not believe Captain Atkinson had known he took the wrong plane.
Russel A. Potter is presiding at the hearing and other members of the C.A.B. panel were James N. Peyton, Earle R. Mitchell and Will Sievert.
George Woodward, Fresno county deputy sheriff, testified he saw the plane in the air trailing a streamer of white smoke from the left engine.
He said he heard a dull explosion and saw flame bursting from the left wing. Then the ship went out of control, he said, and the left wing broke off. The plane spiraled down and crashed.
M.A. Wilmirth, superintendent of the Fresno county road camp, near the crash scene, said that nine of the bodies strewn on the ground, looked as if they had fallen from the plane before the crash.
Earle R. Mitchell, C.A.B. investigator, said an investigation of the wreckage showed there was little external evidence of fire on the left engine.
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