The first accident involved the DC-4 which ran out of fuel over the Atlantic off Shannon, Ireland, and was forced to ditch with a subsequent loss of seven of its DP passengers and a crew man.

A second crash occurred when a 202, flying a load of military personnel cross-country from Oakland, attempted to make a landing at Tucumcari, New Mexico, during a November, 1951 snowstorm. Nelson himself joined the investigation which followed the crash.

"The pilot had plenty of gas to go on to Amarillo, or back to Albuquerque-with satisfactory weather conditions at both those points-but he was apparently determined to get into Tucumcari. When the 202 got over Tucumcari, the tower told them that the weather had depreciated and the ceiling was something like 125 feet-below minimum limits.

"Despite this, the pilot went down and made nearly five passes at the field in practically zero-zero conditions. Finally, on his last pass, he apparently saw the runway going crossways and a little downwind, so he made a steep bank to turn around and come back and try to land. During the turn he hooked a wing on the ground and the wing broke off just outboard of the engine. The airplane hit again on that stub of the broken wing and cart-wheeled, broke off the nose just behind the cockpit, spun around, and then went sailing backward about 400 or 500 feet. There were 26 passengers and a crew of three aboard and everybody got out but one boy, who had been sitting in the center of the cabin where the fuselage broke open. He was so severely hurt that he later died.

"When they fished the pilot out they found him upside down in his cockpit. He was upside down and the rest of the
airplane was right side up. I think the low loss of life in that crash was attributable to the fact that the impact of the crash was cushioned by the passenger seats as the airplane slid backward along the ground. This is a terrific argument for having a backward-seating arrangement in airplanes – in case of a crash you get your body load distributed over the entire seat."

Transocean's third crash involving passenger fatalities occurred during December, 1952, when a Transocean-operated transport flying for the Japanese Airline hit a peak in Japan in bad weather. Twenty-three Japanese passengers and three Americans were killed in the crash.  A fourth Transocean plane – a C-46 freighter carrying no passengers-crashed on a flight from Point Barrow to Fairbanks, Alaska, during December, 1951.  Rescue parties finally found the plane and the flyers on a peak some 4,300 feet high 30 miles northwest of Fairbanks. The pilot had apparently flown into the mountain during a snow squall. Nelson has never discovered what caused the accident, except that the C-46 was too low in the wrong place.

The fourth serious TAL accident occurred in April, 1953, when a DC-4 on a flight from Roswell, New Mexico, to Guam with a group of military personnel crashed during an approach to Oakland Airport, where the plane was scheduled to make a crew change. Although there was a high overcast at the time, conditions were otherwise favorable and the plane gave no indication, during the radio contacts controlling its approach, that it was in any trouble. An extensive investigation following the crash failed to determine the cause of the accident. Harvey Rogers, Transocean's chief pilot and one of the country's most experienced flyers, was at the controls at the time of the accident.