A is for Airplane Crash

In the first of 26 installments (one for each letter of the alphabet) that will surely stretch out over many months, this blog will feature an interesting topic that I found by searching through the "A" vertical files at work on an extremely slow Saturday in the archive.

A is for Airplane Crash

B-17

While the Rocky Mountains may draw tourists for their beauty and serenity, they've proved fatal to pilots and passengers on numerous occasions. One of the most well known crashes in northern Colorado was that of the B-17 bomber during World War II. As part of our yearly elk hunting trip my dad and I inevitably wind up at that end of a long dirt road tucked deep in the Rockies. The road dead ends at a large bronze marker that commemorates the crash that happened in late October 1943. Eight airmen died when the flying fortress was "forced down" onto the mountain side in the middle of the night during a routine training mission. The crash site is a top a large boulder field at the peak of a 12,148-foot mountain. The oldest person to die in the crash was 25-year-old Joseph R. Arnold.

While a road stretches to the base of the mountain today, in 1943, the search for the crash and the recovery of the bodies was not as easy as following the popular trail head that leads hikers up to the remains of the crash and the four massive engines that are still scattered across the mountainside. The rescue party used Army jeeps battled freezing winds and snow to reach the general area, pack mules to climb even closer, and then carried stretchers and poles up the steep mountainside to the boulder field. It's government policy not to retrieve planes or their pars from the crash sites. Unlike other plane crashes in the mountains of Colorado, this B-17 crash site is now easily accessible with three or four hours of determined physical effort.

In a more gruesome and deadly crash, a DC-6 United Airlines mainliner crashed into a mountainside in the middle of the night in late June 1951. En route from San Francisco, the passenger jet carrying 50 people attempted to cut its route from Salt Lake City to Denver short by cutting the corner, literally. Normally, passenger jets wait until they are approaching Cheyenne before turning south towards Denver. Running late out of San Francisco and then out of Salt Lake, the pilot decided to cut the corner on his route and started heading south towards Stapleton airport as he approached Laramie. When the plane crashed it was a mere 50 feet too low to clear the tourist-attracting rockies. It struck nose-first, implanting the pilot, co-pilot, and two or three of the passengers at the point of impact. One of the flight officers still had his hands clenched as if he were still gripping the controls. The tail section of the plane bounced high in the air, a quarter-mile past the nose section, and rested a steep hillside. Fifty yards beyond the tail section lay the rest of the bodies, scattered grotesquely among their possessions and the mail shipment of the day. It took more than 10 hours for the plane to be located in the dense forrest because it was not its assigned path.

The Denver Post reporter that visited the crash site during the recovery described the site with intense detail that is rarely seen in newspapers today. He wrote, "One man's corpse came to rest atop a boulder. His head was missing. Near the tail section were the remains of a woman, her arms hugged in front of her face where she clasped them in the split second before death." And "a pair of trousers, belt still in place, was draped neatly over a tree limb three feet from the ground, as if a careful owner has hung them there before going to sleep."

DC-6