I remember distinctly the crash's coverage in the LA Times and local TV/radio media in LA; also both my folks worked for Douglas at the time (mother was secretary to the test pilots) and I actually recall somebody at our house (we had a lot of aviation people around) saying words to the effect that "it was overdue" or something like that. I remember thinking, "How is it possible for two airplanes to collide with each other with all that sky to move around in?"

Then six months later it happened again, with fewer lives lost but sadly more trauma to our family. A Douglas DC-7B on a test flight over LA got hit by a weekend warrior in an Air Force F-89; the jet hit an uninhabited canyon near the San Fernando Valley; the DC-7 lost a wing and pinwheeled down into a residential area, with debris killing several kids and injuring several more on a school playground.

My mom was in the flight ops radio room when the DC-7's driver, a great guy named Archie Twitchell, calmly read out instruments as they went down, with just enough time to say "Say goodbye to everybody" before the impact.

Later that year (1957) we flew over the Grand Canyon on another UA DC-7 en route to Chicago, and everybody on board went dead quiet and just stared out the windows as we passed the crash scene.

We take national ATC and all those advances for granted now. It wasn't always so.