The collision of two airliners over the Grand Canyon 50 years ago led to an overhaul of the nation's antiquated air traffic
control system.
By Jennifer Oldham, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 3, 2006
On a day that would transform aviation history, fog hung over Los Angeles International Airport. But it did nothing to
dampen the festive mood as passengers lined up eager to start their Fourth of July holiday.
At one ticket counter, 64 checked in for Trans World Airlines Flight 2 to Kansas City, Mo. Next door, 53 registered for
United Airlines' Chicago-bound Flight 71The two sets of passengers probably saw each other as they walked breezily
through the terminal and outside onto the tarmac, where they boarded the first-class-only flights on rolling staircases. At
the top, flight attendants requested their names, took their hats, and pointed out smoking lounges and bathrooms with
terry towels.
The propeller-driven planes took off three minutes apart. The TWA Super Constellation, dubbed "Star of the Seine," flew
northeast over the San Bernardino Mountains. United's flight plan took the DC-7, known as "Mainliner Vancouver," east
over Palm Springs. Then they leveled off and flew on almost parallel tracks toward Arizona's Painted Desert, dodging
scattered thunderstorms.
No one knows if, as they approached the Grand Canyon, anyone aboard was aware that the two aircraft were creeping
closer and closer together.
It was 10:30 a.m. On June 30, 1956.
At 21,000 feet, four miles above the world famous gorge, the DC-7, traveling at 469 feet-per-second, scraped over the
Constellation, its left wing tip slicing through the Connie's fuselage and detaching its signature triple-fin tail.
At 10:31 a.m., controllers received a radio transmission that was so garbled it would take weeks to decipher: "Salt Lake,
United 718, ah, we're going in."
The airliners plummeted into the desolate canyon 10 miles north of the Desert View outlook on the South Rim. The force
of the impact drove parts of the Constellation 20 feet into the Precambrian granite, twisted silverware into the shape of
pretzels, and fused a dime and a penny in a woman's change purse. All aboard both planes — 128 passengers and crew
members — died.
The spectacular midair collision was the worst commercial aviation accident at that point in the country's history. And for
the flying public, it revealed a dangerously antiquated air traffic system. Advances in aircraft instrumentation after World
War II allowed more pilots to fly in bad weather, even as bureaucrats struggled to figure out how to keep track of a
burgeoning number of planes moving faster and carrying more passengers.
At the dawn of the jet age, aviation experts had repeatedly warned lawmakers that a midair collision between two large,
fully-loaded commercial aircraft was inevitable due to increasingly crowded skies and traffic control procedures that relied
largely on radio communication rather than radar. After a plane left the airspace encircling a large city airport, radar
tracking stopped; its crew was left to watch for other planes by looking out the windows.
Aviation historians would later write that the effect of the Grand Canyon disaster was "as galvanic as if it had happened
over Washington itself." Congress would allocate $810 million to buy navigation equipment and long-range radar, and
begin a sweeping reorganization of the nation's fledgling aviation system.
"The Federal Aviation Administration was created out of the ashes of that Grand Canyon crash," said Sid McGuirk, an
associate professor of air traffic management at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
As the aircraft burned in the canyon that morning where the roaring Colorado River met the sedate Little Colorado River,
controllers radioed frantically in search of the two planes, neither of which had reported in.
They wouldn't be found until dusk, when two brothers who operated an aviation sightseeing company, Palen and Henry
Hudgin, flew over the wreckage in their tiny, fixed-wing craft.
"When we saw the fuselage of the United plane it had not burned up yet, and was completely intact, including the pilot
compartment," Henry Hudgin said in a recent interview with The Times, noting that the fuselage had become lodged in a
500-foot deep fissure on the side of a cliff. "We were both really surprised the next morning when we flew out there to see
it was totally burned up."
On July 1, federal investigators, TWA and United representatives, military units and hordes of reporters descended on the
canyon. The rugged terrain "created the worst recovery conditions in the history of airline accidents," declared an article
in the July 5, 1956, TWA employee newspaper, "Skyliner."
Pilots made 76 trips into the gorge over the next 10 days in banana-shaped, twin-rotor helicopters. Years later, some
recalled that dropping 7,000 feet from the rim to the river through turbulent, 120-degree air was more frightening than
missions they later flew in Vietnam, said Dan Driskill, a Flagstaff, Ariz., paramedic who is writing a book about the crash.
Meanwhile, climbers tried in vain to scale a 1,000-foot Redwall limestone cliff to reach the DC-7, which had rammed into a
promontory on Chuar Butte halfway between the 6,394-foot mesa and the river. Wreckage was showered across the
rocky slope and into the adjacent crevasse.
Climbers didn't reach the United site until July 5, when they discovered a shelf above the wreck that was wide enough to
support a helicopter. Boulder, Colo., climber Dave Lewis, then 20, was among the first to arrive.
"I walked to the edge of the flat ground and I was suddenly staring at a steep gully packed with blackened wreckage and
all surrounded by spectacular scenery," Lewis said in a recent interview. "It's indescribable if you've never seen a plane
crash that burned. It's just chaos. How do you describe particular brands of chaos?"
The TWA wreckage, about 1 1/2 miles south of the United site and 500 yards above the river on Temple Butte, was more
accessible.
For several days, investigators were reluctant to speculate about what caused the crash, until they found a mangled piece
of the DC-7's left wing at the TWA site. Embedded in a tear on the wing was material from the Constellation's rear cabin
ceiling.
After collecting aircraft parts and hauling them out of the canyon, as well as tape recordings from air traffic control centers
in Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, investigators began piecing together what happened.
control system.
By Jennifer Oldham, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 3, 2006
On a day that would transform aviation history, fog hung over Los Angeles International Airport. But it did nothing to
dampen the festive mood as passengers lined up eager to start their Fourth of July holiday.
At one ticket counter, 64 checked in for Trans World Airlines Flight 2 to Kansas City, Mo. Next door, 53 registered for
United Airlines' Chicago-bound Flight 71The two sets of passengers probably saw each other as they walked breezily
through the terminal and outside onto the tarmac, where they boarded the first-class-only flights on rolling staircases. At
the top, flight attendants requested their names, took their hats, and pointed out smoking lounges and bathrooms with
terry towels.
The propeller-driven planes took off three minutes apart. The TWA Super Constellation, dubbed "Star of the Seine," flew
northeast over the San Bernardino Mountains. United's flight plan took the DC-7, known as "Mainliner Vancouver," east
over Palm Springs. Then they leveled off and flew on almost parallel tracks toward Arizona's Painted Desert, dodging
scattered thunderstorms.
No one knows if, as they approached the Grand Canyon, anyone aboard was aware that the two aircraft were creeping
closer and closer together.
It was 10:30 a.m. On June 30, 1956.
At 21,000 feet, four miles above the world famous gorge, the DC-7, traveling at 469 feet-per-second, scraped over the
Constellation, its left wing tip slicing through the Connie's fuselage and detaching its signature triple-fin tail.
At 10:31 a.m., controllers received a radio transmission that was so garbled it would take weeks to decipher: "Salt Lake,
United 718, ah, we're going in."
The airliners plummeted into the desolate canyon 10 miles north of the Desert View outlook on the South Rim. The force
of the impact drove parts of the Constellation 20 feet into the Precambrian granite, twisted silverware into the shape of
pretzels, and fused a dime and a penny in a woman's change purse. All aboard both planes — 128 passengers and crew
members — died.
The spectacular midair collision was the worst commercial aviation accident at that point in the country's history. And for
the flying public, it revealed a dangerously antiquated air traffic system. Advances in aircraft instrumentation after World
War II allowed more pilots to fly in bad weather, even as bureaucrats struggled to figure out how to keep track of a
burgeoning number of planes moving faster and carrying more passengers.
At the dawn of the jet age, aviation experts had repeatedly warned lawmakers that a midair collision between two large,
fully-loaded commercial aircraft was inevitable due to increasingly crowded skies and traffic control procedures that relied
largely on radio communication rather than radar. After a plane left the airspace encircling a large city airport, radar
tracking stopped; its crew was left to watch for other planes by looking out the windows.
Aviation historians would later write that the effect of the Grand Canyon disaster was "as galvanic as if it had happened
over Washington itself." Congress would allocate $810 million to buy navigation equipment and long-range radar, and
begin a sweeping reorganization of the nation's fledgling aviation system.
"The Federal Aviation Administration was created out of the ashes of that Grand Canyon crash," said Sid McGuirk, an
associate professor of air traffic management at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
As the aircraft burned in the canyon that morning where the roaring Colorado River met the sedate Little Colorado River,
controllers radioed frantically in search of the two planes, neither of which had reported in.
They wouldn't be found until dusk, when two brothers who operated an aviation sightseeing company, Palen and Henry
Hudgin, flew over the wreckage in their tiny, fixed-wing craft.
"When we saw the fuselage of the United plane it had not burned up yet, and was completely intact, including the pilot
compartment," Henry Hudgin said in a recent interview with The Times, noting that the fuselage had become lodged in a
500-foot deep fissure on the side of a cliff. "We were both really surprised the next morning when we flew out there to see
it was totally burned up."
On July 1, federal investigators, TWA and United representatives, military units and hordes of reporters descended on the
canyon. The rugged terrain "created the worst recovery conditions in the history of airline accidents," declared an article
in the July 5, 1956, TWA employee newspaper, "Skyliner."
Pilots made 76 trips into the gorge over the next 10 days in banana-shaped, twin-rotor helicopters. Years later, some
recalled that dropping 7,000 feet from the rim to the river through turbulent, 120-degree air was more frightening than
missions they later flew in Vietnam, said Dan Driskill, a Flagstaff, Ariz., paramedic who is writing a book about the crash.
Meanwhile, climbers tried in vain to scale a 1,000-foot Redwall limestone cliff to reach the DC-7, which had rammed into a
promontory on Chuar Butte halfway between the 6,394-foot mesa and the river. Wreckage was showered across the
rocky slope and into the adjacent crevasse.
Climbers didn't reach the United site until July 5, when they discovered a shelf above the wreck that was wide enough to
support a helicopter. Boulder, Colo., climber Dave Lewis, then 20, was among the first to arrive.
"I walked to the edge of the flat ground and I was suddenly staring at a steep gully packed with blackened wreckage and
all surrounded by spectacular scenery," Lewis said in a recent interview. "It's indescribable if you've never seen a plane
crash that burned. It's just chaos. How do you describe particular brands of chaos?"
The TWA wreckage, about 1 1/2 miles south of the United site and 500 yards above the river on Temple Butte, was more
accessible.
For several days, investigators were reluctant to speculate about what caused the crash, until they found a mangled piece
of the DC-7's left wing at the TWA site. Embedded in a tear on the wing was material from the Constellation's rear cabin
ceiling.
After collecting aircraft parts and hauling them out of the canyon, as well as tape recordings from air traffic control centers
in Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, investigators began piecing together what happened.
At congressional hearings in Las Vegas a week after the collision, federal aviation officials testified that when the planes
hit, the pilots were flying outside designated airways and several miles off course.
A few minutes after TWA Flight 2 lifted off the LAX runway at 9:01 a.m., investigators said, Capt. Jack Gandy had asked
for a change in altitude from 19,000 feet to 21,000 feet to avoid thunderstorms. Seeing on their radar that United Flight
718 was at 21,000 feet, Los Angeles controllers denied the request. A Salt Lake City controller radioed a colleague in
Los Angeles "their courses cross and they are right together."
After he was denied the altitude change, Gandy asked to fly 1,000 feet above the clouds. His request was granted, and
he was told the United flight was in the area, but not its altitude. Gandy climbed to 21,000 feet.
At the hearing, the Salt Lake controller testified he didn't warn the pilots about each other because they had left
controlled airspace to fly more directly to their cross-country destinations and consequently he had no idea what routes
they would follow.
The public disclosure that so much of the nation's airspace was uncontrolled shocked a country confident after victories
in two world wars and overtaken by Elvis mania, where efforts to build a federal highway system had dominated
Congress' attention. At the time, editorial cartoons displayed newly signed highway bills next to airway plans covered with
cobwebs.
In early 1957, the Civil Aeronautics Board — a precursor to the National Transportation Safety Board — released a 25-
page report that found the probable cause for the accident was that the "pilots did not see each other in time to avoid the
collision." Investigators wrote: "It is not possible to determine why the pilots did not see each other."
The evidence did suggest, they said, that "attempting to provide the passengers with a more scenic view of the Grand
Canyon area" could have been a factor.
The report emphasized that under air traffic rules at the time, the pilots had been required to separate themselves from
other aircraft using a "see or be seen" principle. This was necessary because the nation lacked the controllers and
equipment to track airplanes outside of designated routes.
Since the 1930s, air traffic at high altitudes had been controlled by a rudimentary system based on radio
communications. Pilots would periodically radio their heading, altitude and speed to their company's ground station, and
the company would relay the information to air traffic controllers. The controllers would scribble the details for each flight
on strips of paper and place them on a metal tray lined with horizontal slots. Each slot represented 1,000 feet of airspace
— helping controllers visualize how to keep aircraft they could not see separated from one another.
Aghast that the system was largely operated on such a primitive concept just two years before jets were set to make their
long-awaited commercial debut, lawmakers ordered drastic upgrades.
Many of the changes — including integrating the civil and military air traffic control systems, and ordering radar and other
equipment to help controllers actually see each plane's location — had been proposed for years but failed to receive
adequate funding.
It took decades for federal officials to install enough equipment and build enough control centers to monitor all high-
altitude traffic over the United States. By 1971, airspace above 18,000 feet was reserved for aircraft carrying
transponders that were able to communicate a plane's flight number and location to radar installations on the ground.
Word of the crash reached families of the victims slowly, as what began as a mystery of missing planes hardened into
grim reality.
Neil Davis' sister, Beth, 24, was one of two flight attendants on TWA Flight 2. When he learned of the crash, Davis drove
all night from his home in Ogden, Utah, to TWA headquarters in Kansas City. Once there, George Levering, a TWA
manager, told him: "There is no hope: everyone was killed. Your sister is gone."
Beth Davis, one of five siblings in the tight-knit family from upstate New York, had been only a month away from leaving
TWA to accept a Ford Foundation scholarship to study teaching at Cornell University in New York.
"I went completely crazy," Davis recalled in a 1994 memoir he wrote about Beth. "I jumped up and ran out of the office
and out of the building into the parking lot, not to my car or anywhere in particular, just away."
hit, the pilots were flying outside designated airways and several miles off course.
A few minutes after TWA Flight 2 lifted off the LAX runway at 9:01 a.m., investigators said, Capt. Jack Gandy had asked
for a change in altitude from 19,000 feet to 21,000 feet to avoid thunderstorms. Seeing on their radar that United Flight
718 was at 21,000 feet, Los Angeles controllers denied the request. A Salt Lake City controller radioed a colleague in
Los Angeles "their courses cross and they are right together."
After he was denied the altitude change, Gandy asked to fly 1,000 feet above the clouds. His request was granted, and
he was told the United flight was in the area, but not its altitude. Gandy climbed to 21,000 feet.
At the hearing, the Salt Lake controller testified he didn't warn the pilots about each other because they had left
controlled airspace to fly more directly to their cross-country destinations and consequently he had no idea what routes
they would follow.
The public disclosure that so much of the nation's airspace was uncontrolled shocked a country confident after victories
in two world wars and overtaken by Elvis mania, where efforts to build a federal highway system had dominated
Congress' attention. At the time, editorial cartoons displayed newly signed highway bills next to airway plans covered with
cobwebs.
In early 1957, the Civil Aeronautics Board — a precursor to the National Transportation Safety Board — released a 25-
page report that found the probable cause for the accident was that the "pilots did not see each other in time to avoid the
collision." Investigators wrote: "It is not possible to determine why the pilots did not see each other."
The evidence did suggest, they said, that "attempting to provide the passengers with a more scenic view of the Grand
Canyon area" could have been a factor.
The report emphasized that under air traffic rules at the time, the pilots had been required to separate themselves from
other aircraft using a "see or be seen" principle. This was necessary because the nation lacked the controllers and
equipment to track airplanes outside of designated routes.
Since the 1930s, air traffic at high altitudes had been controlled by a rudimentary system based on radio
communications. Pilots would periodically radio their heading, altitude and speed to their company's ground station, and
the company would relay the information to air traffic controllers. The controllers would scribble the details for each flight
on strips of paper and place them on a metal tray lined with horizontal slots. Each slot represented 1,000 feet of airspace
— helping controllers visualize how to keep aircraft they could not see separated from one another.
Aghast that the system was largely operated on such a primitive concept just two years before jets were set to make their
long-awaited commercial debut, lawmakers ordered drastic upgrades.
Many of the changes — including integrating the civil and military air traffic control systems, and ordering radar and other
equipment to help controllers actually see each plane's location — had been proposed for years but failed to receive
adequate funding.
It took decades for federal officials to install enough equipment and build enough control centers to monitor all high-
altitude traffic over the United States. By 1971, airspace above 18,000 feet was reserved for aircraft carrying
transponders that were able to communicate a plane's flight number and location to radar installations on the ground.
Word of the crash reached families of the victims slowly, as what began as a mystery of missing planes hardened into
grim reality.
Neil Davis' sister, Beth, 24, was one of two flight attendants on TWA Flight 2. When he learned of the crash, Davis drove
all night from his home in Ogden, Utah, to TWA headquarters in Kansas City. Once there, George Levering, a TWA
manager, told him: "There is no hope: everyone was killed. Your sister is gone."
Beth Davis, one of five siblings in the tight-knit family from upstate New York, had been only a month away from leaving
TWA to accept a Ford Foundation scholarship to study teaching at Cornell University in New York.
"I went completely crazy," Davis recalled in a 1994 memoir he wrote about Beth. "I jumped up and ran out of the office
and out of the building into the parking lot, not to my car or anywhere in particular, just away."
In Washington, D.C., another Davis sister, Jayne Szaz, didn't realize Beth had been working on the Super Connie and
was now missing until she received a call from another brother, Wayne.
"I couldn't sleep I was so stunned," Szaz said. "When the morning came, I went home on the train — it took me nine
hours to go from Washington to central New York state."
After grieving with her parents and siblings over the death of the family's "emotional center" — Szaz took the first
airplane ride of her life to attend a memorial for her sister in Flagstaff, where the remains of TWA Flight 2 passengers
are buried. Some United passengers were laid to rest in a common grave at the Grand Canyon cemetery.
The death of Whittier resident James Jang, a chemical engineer for Fluor Corp. also traveling on TWA Flight 2, sent his
wife into a deep depression. She was hospitalized two years later in Belmont, Calif., where she received electric shock
treatment.
"My mother and my father got into an argument before he left," said Jon Jang, a San Francisco musician who was a little
more than 2 years old when his father died. "She didn't want him to go. She never got over that — to leave in an
argument."
When he turned 39, Jon Jang requested letters from his dad's closest friends, who referred to him as "Jimmie," and
described a disciplined, intelligent man whose "power of concentration was awesome."
James Jang, a 5-foot, 2-inch former Boy Scout and amateur magician, also had a keen sense of humor: "On a dare, [he]
asked a 6-foot blond at a nightclub to dance with him — she did," wrote his childhood friend Eddy Way.
The accident hit TWA employees particularly hard. They lost 17 colleagues flying as both passengers and crew,
including Tom Ashton, an industrial relations supervisor who had recently posed as one of the Andrews Sisters for a
company skit. Also on board was Joe Kite, an assistant to the construction director, Kite's pregnant wife and his two
daughters. When employees flipped their company calendars to July on the day after the accident, they found a picture
of the Grand Canyon.
Fifty years later, the crash still scars the Grand Canyon.
Wreckage remains scattered on the near-vertical walls of Chuar and Temple buttes, the treacherous canyon so
forbidding in 1956 that investigators stayed just long enough to collect the human remains and several aircraft parts. To
prevent looting, the National Park Service closed the sites for 20 years. In 1976, park rangers asked the airlines to
remove several large pieces, saying tourists "may consider the visible aircraft remains as blight on the natural scenic
beauty of the Grand Canyon." Then they reopened the area.
Even so, flash floods that follow summer monsoons continually unearth pieces of wreckage. By some accounts, 40% of
the Super Connie remains, along with 85% of the DC-7.
At the TWA site in 1990, hiker Mike McComb found a tan purse containing identification, a TWA schedule, a stamp
book, a scarf and several sticks of gum. "It was kind of a time capsule," said McComb, a pilot who has made the
strenuous 50-mile journey to the site several times and flies tourists over it daily.
"As I approached the TWA site, there were little teardrops of melted aluminum that had splashed on the canyon," said
Driskill, the Flagstaff paramedic, of a recent hike to Temple Butte. "Then I saw solid puddles of melted aluminum spilled
down rocks. There were big chunks of aircraft aluminum — bigger than a person — buried under boulders."
Family members remain similarly marked by that day.
"The world should benefit in some way from the untimely loss of a worthy person; there should be a trade-off," Jayne
Szaz wrote of her sister Beth. "But search as we might, we could find no such meaning in Beth's death."
Szaz has painstakingly collected pictures of Davis and letters she wrote various family members and placed them in a
three-ring binder. Included are slides Davis took during her three years at TWA.
There are scenic spots in Germany and Italy, and a picture of the Grand Canyon, which Davis shot from an airplane
window several months before her death.
"Being the studious person that Beth was," her brother Neil wrote, "she had annotated almost every picture and slide….
On this particular one of the gaping canyon below, she had written: 'What a place to die!' "
was now missing until she received a call from another brother, Wayne.
"I couldn't sleep I was so stunned," Szaz said. "When the morning came, I went home on the train — it took me nine
hours to go from Washington to central New York state."
After grieving with her parents and siblings over the death of the family's "emotional center" — Szaz took the first
airplane ride of her life to attend a memorial for her sister in Flagstaff, where the remains of TWA Flight 2 passengers
are buried. Some United passengers were laid to rest in a common grave at the Grand Canyon cemetery.
The death of Whittier resident James Jang, a chemical engineer for Fluor Corp. also traveling on TWA Flight 2, sent his
wife into a deep depression. She was hospitalized two years later in Belmont, Calif., where she received electric shock
treatment.
"My mother and my father got into an argument before he left," said Jon Jang, a San Francisco musician who was a little
more than 2 years old when his father died. "She didn't want him to go. She never got over that — to leave in an
argument."
When he turned 39, Jon Jang requested letters from his dad's closest friends, who referred to him as "Jimmie," and
described a disciplined, intelligent man whose "power of concentration was awesome."
James Jang, a 5-foot, 2-inch former Boy Scout and amateur magician, also had a keen sense of humor: "On a dare, [he]
asked a 6-foot blond at a nightclub to dance with him — she did," wrote his childhood friend Eddy Way.
The accident hit TWA employees particularly hard. They lost 17 colleagues flying as both passengers and crew,
including Tom Ashton, an industrial relations supervisor who had recently posed as one of the Andrews Sisters for a
company skit. Also on board was Joe Kite, an assistant to the construction director, Kite's pregnant wife and his two
daughters. When employees flipped their company calendars to July on the day after the accident, they found a picture
of the Grand Canyon.
Fifty years later, the crash still scars the Grand Canyon.
Wreckage remains scattered on the near-vertical walls of Chuar and Temple buttes, the treacherous canyon so
forbidding in 1956 that investigators stayed just long enough to collect the human remains and several aircraft parts. To
prevent looting, the National Park Service closed the sites for 20 years. In 1976, park rangers asked the airlines to
remove several large pieces, saying tourists "may consider the visible aircraft remains as blight on the natural scenic
beauty of the Grand Canyon." Then they reopened the area.
Even so, flash floods that follow summer monsoons continually unearth pieces of wreckage. By some accounts, 40% of
the Super Connie remains, along with 85% of the DC-7.
At the TWA site in 1990, hiker Mike McComb found a tan purse containing identification, a TWA schedule, a stamp
book, a scarf and several sticks of gum. "It was kind of a time capsule," said McComb, a pilot who has made the
strenuous 50-mile journey to the site several times and flies tourists over it daily.
"As I approached the TWA site, there were little teardrops of melted aluminum that had splashed on the canyon," said
Driskill, the Flagstaff paramedic, of a recent hike to Temple Butte. "Then I saw solid puddles of melted aluminum spilled
down rocks. There were big chunks of aircraft aluminum — bigger than a person — buried under boulders."
Family members remain similarly marked by that day.
"The world should benefit in some way from the untimely loss of a worthy person; there should be a trade-off," Jayne
Szaz wrote of her sister Beth. "But search as we might, we could find no such meaning in Beth's death."
Szaz has painstakingly collected pictures of Davis and letters she wrote various family members and placed them in a
three-ring binder. Included are slides Davis took during her three years at TWA.
There are scenic spots in Germany and Italy, and a picture of the Grand Canyon, which Davis shot from an airplane
window several months before her death.
"Being the studious person that Beth was," her brother Neil wrote, "she had annotated almost every picture and slide….
On this particular one of the gaping canyon below, she had written: 'What a place to die!' "
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