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Aircraft Wrecks in the Mountains and Deserts of the American West This Article
Appeared in the Wall Street Journal
Crash Buffs Scout Airplane Wrecks That Litter the West Aviation Archaeologist Scroggins Seeks Jets Near Lake Mead; Finding Bones in a Shoe By SCOTT McCARTNEY Staff Reporter OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL TEMPLE BAR, Ariz. -Relishing yet another brush with disaster, Doug Scroggins spends three hours scouring the parched hills along Lake Mead. Suddenly, he spies some terrain that seems to match the rocks and peaks in the faded, 46-year-old photograph that has been his guide. "This must be it," he cries, scrambling to the top of a ridge. Not that the goateed 32-year-old expects to meet his own ruin on the other side. Mr. Scroggins is among the growing ranks of amateur "aviation archaeologists," who hike the deserts and mountains of the West searching for crash sites. Some are treasure hunters looking for rumored caches of jewelry and cash, while others are historians working to re-create vintage warplanes. Most. however. are just relentlessly curious It's not the kind of hobby you can really tell people about," admits Mr. Scroggins gins. "But there's a tremendous thrill if you find one." Actually, quite a bit remains in the West of crashed planes from the 1940s and 1950s, when navigation was less precise and airplanes less reliable. Back then, authorities often recovered bodies and vital aircraft pieces for investigators and left the rest to the wild. In California alone, there are about 1,500 wrecks on mountainsides. Not all wrecks are hidden. Just 100 feet off a highway northwest of Las Vegas. drivers whiz past the remains of an Air Force P-39 fighter that nosed in during a 1945 training flight, leaving behind radio parts. a blackened fuel bladder and the end of a machine gun. High-school teacher G. Pat Macha, of Hawthorne, Calif., got hooked on crashes while working as a hike master 35 years ago at a YMCA camp near San Bernardino. There, he stumbled upon the wreck of a C-47 transport that still had parachutes, clothing and other personal effects. "When you reach one of these wrecks, you're going into the past and touching the past," says Mr. Macha. who has visited 500 crash sites, lectured to pilot groups and published a guidebook on California wrecks. "There are great stories associated with them." Some searches have a special purpose. A group of California aviation buffs has picked mountains clean of parts in an effort to rebuild the only Curtiss P-40 Tomahawk that survived the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The plane later crashed in Hawaii on a training flight. The Curtiss-Wright Historical Association in Torrance, Calif.. recovered the wreckage in 1985 from the Koolau Mountains, and then found two other Tomahawk crash sites high in California's Sierra Mountains. In a Torrance Airport hangar, the project team is rebuilding the plane with blueprints and pieces, using what it can from the crash sites. "We could never do this if we hadn't found those wrecks," says Kent S. Lentz, 60, a semiretired aerospace engineer who is leading the effort. The pot of gold for an aviation archaeologist is an airplane's data plate, showing its serial number and other vital information. It allows the plane and its story to be precisely documented and is one of the few pieces of debris wreck hunters actually collect. At most sites, only tiny pieces are found - twisted fasteners, mangled struts, rusted springs. Some planes crashed relatively softly, however, yielding larger, more recognizable debris. Mr. Scroggins, a lanky free-lance video producer, has found airplane seats, luggage and. once. a woman's shoe with bones in it. "Anything human we find, we bury," he says. "Some of these sites can be pretty spooky." An aviation buff who had studied classic airplanes, Mr. Scroggins read a news story about the crash of a private plane, and he decided to go see the site. Fascinated by the scene but repulsed by the fresh smell of disaster, he subsequently focused his interest on old wrecks Aiming ultimately to turn his hobby into a career, he has put together a traveling air-show exhibit, launched a magazine called "Lost Birds," and begun work on a "Mishap Museum." To locate crash sites, he collects old photos of wrecks, often from government investigation files or newspaper archives. Then, &127; with an approximate location, he tries to match the contour of the background in the photos with the mountain vistas as he hikes. Among the 70 or so wrecks Mr. Scroggins has visited are the Trans World Airlines DC-3 that crashed in 1942 outside Las Vegas with 22 people on board, including actress Carole Lombard, and a United Airlines DC-7 that crashed in 1958 closer to Las Vegas after colliding with an Air Force F-100 jet. That site, which may soon be paved over with tract homes, still holds silverware, shards of cups and junior pilot wings with United's logo. On this day, Mr. Scroggins is hunting two Air Force P-80 jets that collided in 1952 over Lake Mead while practicing dogfights. Old reports indicate wreckage was found as far from the water as three-quarters of a mile. This is Mr. Scroggins second attempt to find traces of the accident, and with a declassified hand-drawn map, he thinks he has narrowed the search. Pausing, Mr. Scroggins glances back and forth between photocopies of muddy, old black-and-white photos, and the wind-carved mountains near Lake Mead. "The pictures aren't very good - they never are." he grumbles. "Rocks and ridges, they can play tricks on you. You walk 15 or 20 feet, and the landscape can change." Anything shiny catches his eye. His heart pounding, he charges up a hill after spotting a flash in the dirt, but he becomes dejected as he closes in. "Just a frigging rock," he says. When someone in a search party actually finds a metal piece, the tradition is to yell "Wreckage!" so others know both the location of the debris field and the identity of the discoverer. Some days. there is no shouting. After scampering up three crests, more than a mile from the nearest trail, Mr. Scroggins is growing frustrated. "Let's just go over the next ridge," he says. "One rivet, that's all I ask. From a midair, there's got to be something here." The desert doesn't yield its secrets this day. "Sometimes it's just a .wild-goose chase," he says. "But if I can't find it on the second try, I always find it on the third." A week later, he found small pieces of the wreckage - over one more ridge. |
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