of water rising above the hangars, and one guard—at his post on the Cross Bay Bridge—saw the aircraft roll over. The aircraft crashed into a remote area of marshland on Jamaica Bay used as a wildlife sanctuary. Upwards of 300 policemen and fire fighters, including 125 detectives attending a narcotics seminar at the police academy, as well as Coast Guard helicopters, were mobilized to the crash site within 30 minutes of the crash for rescue operations, only to find no survivors. The three-alarm fire was under control by 10:50, when only wreckage remained. Low tides aided search personnel in their attempts to recover bodies from the downed aircraft. Only a few bodies remained intact. Federal investigation The Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) received notification of the accident at 10:10 am and immediately sent investigators to Jamaica Bay to conduct an investigation. The flight recorder was found on March 9 and sent to Washington, DC, for analysis. Public hearings were held at the International Hotel in New York on March 20–23, 1962. Investigators were unable to recover sufficient body tissue to determine whether the crew had been physically incapacitated at the time of the crash. Toxicology reports conclusively ruled out toxic gases, alcohol, and drugs as possible causes for the crash. Milton Helpern, Chief Medical Examiner, decided that having relatives attempt visual identification of the crash victims was inhumane and ordered dental and fingerprint comparisons. In early July, the CAB announced their investigators believed that a cotter pin and a bolt missing from the rudder mechanism might have caused the aircraft"s crash. Though considered to be a "mechanic's oversight", the CAB nevertheless wired all operators of 707s to inform them of the potential danger of the assembly. In January 1963, the CAB released its aircraft accident report stating that the "most likely abnormality" to have caused the crash was a short circuit caused by wires in the automatic piloting system that had been damaged in the manufacturing process. It stated that the probable cause of the accident was "...rudder control system malfunction producing yaw, sideslip, and roll leading to a loss of control from which recovery was not effective" and concluded "that a rudder servo malfunction due to shorted wires is the most likely abnormality to have produced the accident." CAB inspectors had inspected units at a Bendix Corporation plant in Teterboro, New Jersey, and discovered workers using tweezers to bind up