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possible, however, in view of the extreme unfamiliarity of the experience of spinning in a transport airplane and of the special difficulties presented by instrument conditions and rough air, that even a highly expert pilot might lose as much as 5,000 feet before being able to complete the maneuvers for checking the spin and recovering from the subsequent dive; but the need for speculation on the possibility is reduced by the mute denial of any likelihood of the airplane having spun that was provided by the position of the wreckage and by the reading (as previously referred to) of the directional gyro. At the time of impact the airplane was on its normal heading of 310 degrees magnetic, and it would have been most extraordinary if the pilot should have struck the ground during an unintentional spin, or in process of recovery from it, on the same compass heading at which the spin had begun. Tests of the directional gyro by its maker also indicate that if the airplane were spinning with its nose down as much as 40 degrees (as it probably would be in a fully-developed spin) the gyro element would have tumbled in the case and the instrument would have ceased to give any semblance of a true indication of heading. The uniform distribution of the wreckage ahead of the point of impact indicated that no rotation around the longitudinal or vertical axis of the airplane was occurring at the time of impact, which would in itself eliminate the possibility that the airplane was actually in a spin when it struck, although it would still leave the chance that the airplane might have been in a spin, which the pilot had checked, and that it had struck the ground before it had been possible for him to complete the flattening out of the flight path from the subsequent dive before striking the ground.
The direction in which the airplane was headed at the time of impact
