The Boeing 247D was on approach to Union Air Terminal at Burbank, descending through heavy rain and fog on the morning of January 12, 1937. Flying the scheduled route from Salt Lake City, the airliner had gone off course. Pilot William L. Lewis was looking for the San Fernando Valley floor when a ridge appeared directly ahead through the murk. He cut power to both engines and nosed the aircraft down in a controlled pancake — better to hit the hillside at reduced speed than to plow in under full power. The left wingtip struck first. The aircraft skidded 125 feet along the mountainside in a curved path, coming to rest pointed in the direction it had come from.
Of the thirteen people aboard — three crew and ten passengers — one crew member and four passengers died. The pilot's decision to cut power and pancake rather than fight for altitude almost certainly saved eight lives. The airliner had struck a ridge in the hills near Newhall at approximately 3,550 feet elevation, in terrain that would have been invisible in the conditions that morning. The Boeing 247D was a modern aircraft for its era — a twin-engine, all-metal airliner that United Airlines had placed into service in 1933, representing the leading edge of commercial aviation technology. It was fast, reliable, and not designed for instrument approaches into mountain-ringed valleys in fog.
Among the dead was Martin Johnson, one of the most celebrated adventure photographers and filmmakers of the early twentieth century. Johnson and his wife Osa had spent decades documenting wildlife and indigenous peoples across Africa, the South Pacific, and Borneo — their expeditions produced both books and films that brought remote corners of the world to American audiences. They had become famous together, their names linked in public consciousness as a partnership of exploration and documentation. Osa Johnson survived the crash, though she was seriously injured. Martin Johnson died from his injuries. He was 52. The loss registered widely; Johnson was, in the idiom of the time, a household name, and his death in a routine commercial flight added a particular note of irony to his story.
The crash site lies in the hills north of the San Fernando Valley — the same terrain that has claimed aircraft before and since, where mountain ridges and marine layer combine to create conditions that defeated early aviation navigation. The valley below the crash point had been settled for decades; the hills above it remained rugged. Newhall had been a railroad town before it became part of the Santa Clarita Valley's suburban sprawl, and the terrain around it retains the character of the transition zone between the valley floor and the mountain ranges that ring it. The Boeing 247D's registration, NC13315, was documented in film footage shot before the crash, including a brief glimpse at the six-minute mark of a newsreel — one of the few records of this particular aircraft before it came to rest on a California hillside.
The crash site is located at approximately 34.354°N, 118.459°W in the hills north of Newhall, California, near the boundary between the San Fernando Valley and the Santa Clarita Valley. Terrain in this area rises steeply from the valley floor — the hills reach several thousand feet MSL within a short distance. Whiteman Airport (KWHP) lies approximately 16 miles to the south; Van Nuys Airport (KVNY) approximately 18 miles to the south. Exercise caution in reduced visibility — this terrain illustrates exactly why.