The ship was a 75-passenger Braniff Airways turboprop Electra. It carried 28 passengers and a crew of six. It had scheduled stops at Dallas and Washington.
There was no immediate explanation for the crash.
Braniff President CHARLES E. BEARD told newsmen that any statement from the company on the possible cause of the crash would be conjecture and will be determined by federal authorities.
He said the presence aboard of a maintenance engineer, WENDELL J. IDE, probably had no significance.
The plane, costing $2,300,000, was placed in operation only nine days before the crash.
A foggy dawn revealed masses of torn bodies, blooksoaked clothing and mail, with the odor of the plane's kerosene fuel pervading the air.
JACK MILLER of Braniff at Houston said the plane arrived in Houston 22 minutes late and thus was 22 minutes late in leaving the terminal. It became airborne seven minutes later at 10:44 p.m. (CST), MILLER had no explanation of why the craft arrived late.
BRUCE CHAMBERS of the Federal Aviation Agency's control office in Fort Worth, said the ship was flying on an instrument plan at 15,000 feet. It made its last report about 11:06 p.m. when east of Waco, CHAMBERS said. He described the report as a routine filing on the plane's speed and altitude.
The pilot gave no indication of trouble at the time, he added.Broken clouds hovered over this area then. There was thunderstorm activity about 75 miles to the northwest but none in the immediate vicinity, the Weather Bureau said.The airliner crashed on the R. E. WHITE farm, 5 miles southeast of Buffalo, a town of 1,200 population 68 miles southeast of Waco.
"It looked like it exploded as it came over out house, way up in the sky," said MRS. BILLY WEBB, 30. She and her husband watched from their home 5 miles north of where the wreckage hit.The whole sky lit up. If kept on going, and it looked like a falling star.
"The light went out and we heard a terrific noise like a jet breaking the sound barrier. Then we heard it hit the ground and saw a tremendous explosion."E. H. PICKENS, 45, feed store owner in Buffalo, saw the explosion and was one of the first to reach the crash scene.He said there was mail, paper, packages, clothes and bits of bodies and plane wreckage strewn over a square mile of wooded farm country.
PICKENS said he believed the plane exploded in the air "because nothing burned. The smell of kerosene is all over the plane. And there were no fires except a little one where one of the engines hit the ground."The biggest piece of plane I found when I got out there was a section of fuselage about 15 or 20 feet long," he added.
"It wasn't the weather. There were quite a few stars out and just some little patchy cloudiness."
State polilce blocked the narrow dirt road to the crash scene from Buffalo.
In Washington the civil aeronautics board announced an immediate investigation of the crash.
Lockheed Aircraft builds the turboprop Electra.
