51 people packed in a raft for 25.
Air Force Journalist and Ditching Survivor Peter Foley did a lot of writing about the horrors of the ditching and joys of survival. One of his stories with perhaps the most impact appeared in the Saturday Evening Post magazine in October of 1962. Included with that story was an artist rendition of the single, flooded and overcrowded life raft. The picture tells the story quite accurately. (Packed like sardines.)
I remember this article vividly. I was in prep school at Northfield MA and had just returned from a stay of a few weeks on Cape Cod with family friends after the crash. (my parents were both on 923. My father survived, but my mother did not. She was one of the “missing”)
I was in line for dinner at my dorm back at Northfield and I saw this copy of the SEP on a table in the hall. Curious, I picked it up to thumb through, and when it finally dawned on me what I was looking at I went into a sort of low-level shock. I could have done without seeing that. I hadn’t even seen my father at this point, he was still in the hospital in England.