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Re: Plane crashes
Posted: Thu Jan 22, 2015 5:45 pm
by rlown
pretty cool that they survived, esp given where the plane landed. Kudos to the Pilot! nice pic as well.
Thanks for the followup-post, Rogue.
Re: Plane crashes
Posted: Thu Jan 22, 2015 8:00 pm
by RoguePhotonic
I find it funny that it says they suffered a hard landing. You could call it that with debris scattered for hundreds of feet up the slope!
Re: Plane crashes
Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2015 3:52 pm
by gdurkee
There's a group of people who specialize in finding and recording aircraft wrecks. Pat Macha is one of the leaders. His page is here:
http://www.aircraftwrecks.com/
Somewhere there's a forum but I'm not finding it quickly. Also, somewhere in my disorganized data files is a shapefile (derived from an Excel file) of all the wrecks known in California as of about 10 years ago when I acquired it. I vaguely remember compiling it from a larger database for the whole US; converting it to X & Y coordinate fields (it's in DMS), then projecting and converting to a shape file. It was definitely missing some wrecks I knew of in Sequoia Kings.
The grandmother of all missing aircraft is a T-33 that went down somewhere in the LeConte area in '56 (??). Pilot bailed out and survived much of the winter. Found at Simpson in the spring by two rangers. Ultimately, the air force didn't believe him, thought he'd sold the plane to the Russians. He wasn't court martialed, though some wanted to, but left air force. After he died, some scouts coming down off Rimbaud found the cowling from his ejection. The plane has never been found though there's been a couple of attempts to locate it, none serious. The writer Peter Steckel was doing a book on it, as was Eric Blehm, but haven't heard of progress of either.
If I find the database, I'll make it available.
Re: Plane crashes
Posted: Mon Jun 29, 2015 12:23 pm
by jrad
Maybe a good resource:
http://planecrashmap.com/map/ca/ I have no idea if it is 100% complete but it shows a lot of crashes Statewide.
Re: Plane crashes
Posted: Fri Jul 31, 2015 12:08 pm
by jrad
RoguePhotonic wrote:I was wondering what source you all use for plane crash locations? My hiking partner Derek found a piece of a plane on the Western bench of the Kaweahs. I was trying to find some history on planes that have gone down there.
Maybe a good resource:
http://planecrashmap.com/map/ca/ I have no idea if it is 100% complete but it shows a lot of crashes Statewide.