Transcontinental & Western Air (TWA) Flight 3 - January 16, 1942

Clark Gable and Carole Lombard eloped in Kingman, Arizona on March 29, 1939.[100]

When the U.S. entered World War II, Carole Lombard traveled to her home state of Indiana for a war bond rally with her mother and Clark Gable's press agent, Otto Winkler. Lombard raised more than $2 million in defense bonds in a single evening. Her party had been scheduled to return to Los Angeles by train, but Lombard was eager to reach home more quickly and wanted to travel by air. Her mother and Winkler were afraid of flying and insisted that the group follow their original travel plans. In the early morning hours of January 16, 1942, Lombard, her mother and Winkler boarded a Transcontinental and Western Air Douglas DST (Douglas Sleeper Transport) aircraft to return to California.[note 8] After refueling in Las Vegas, TWA Flight 3 took off at 7:07 p.m. and crashed into Double Up Peak near the 8,300-foot (2,530 m) level of Potosi Mountain, 32 statute miles (51 km) southwest of the Las Vegas airport. All 22 aboard, including Lombard, her mother, Winkler and 15 U.S. Army soldiers, were killed.[124] Lombard was 33 years old. The crash's cause was attributed to the flight crew's inability to properly navigate over the mountains surrounding Las Vegas. As a precaution against the possibility of enemy Japanese bomber aircraft coming into American airspace from the Pacific, safety beacons normally used to direct night flights had been turned off, leaving the pilot and crew of the TWA flight without visual warnings of the mountains in their flight path.[125][126]

In 1962, Jill Winkler Rath, widow of publicist Otto Winkler, filed a $100,000 lawsuit against the $2 million estate of Clark Gable in connection with Winkler's death. The suit was dismissed in Los Angeles Superior Court. Rath, in her action, claimed Gable promised to provide financial aid for her if she would not bring suit against the airline involved. Rath stated she later learned that Gable settled his claim against the airline for $10. He did so because he did not want to repeat his grief in court, and subsequently he provided her no financial aid in his will.[132][133]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_3