A place to explore the natural setting (geology, flora & fauna), people, constructed infrastructure and historical events that play and have played a part in shaping the Sierra Nevada as we know it today.
So this year heading back for climbing Red & Black Kaweah I made my way to the lake where Derek had found the aircraft piece. All the way to it I kept a sharp eye out for anything else but found nothing. I found his fuel pod and ate lunch. While sitting and scanning the hill sides carefully I noticed what could have been rocks but could have been something more up the slope a bit so I went up to investigate and found more pieces of the plane. I continued to explore and climb for about 500 feet before I decided I should go back and move on:
I did some searching but still could find no records of any plane crash along the Kaweahs. Maybe this one is still undocumented. I might try contacting the park service and asking If they have any records. And if not I have GPS points of all these debris locations.
After contact with the district ranger the mystery has been solved.
"USAF personnel remove equipment from Douglas A-1E BuNo132435 that crashed 2/25/69 while searching for missing TA-4F. Both A-1E crewmen survived a hard landing in bad weather at 12,000' MSL near Mt. Whitney in the High Sierra. The A-1E wreck was mostly recovered by USMC CH-53 in the 1970's."
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.
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.
