They Never Saw It Coming

By John M. Larsen

One day in 1969, I was driving down State Street in Boise, heading for my home on O’Farrell Street, when an emergency vehicle sounded a warning as it came up behind me.  I pulled over, the truck went by, and it turned on 5th Street. I followed it, and soon came upon a Cessna 210 D that had smashed into the street. The airplane’s twenty-foot-long fuselage had been squashed to about six feet long when the plane dove straight down into the pavement.

At the time, I was working in Boise as an insurance claims investigator but shortly before then I had been an engineer with Boeing Aircraft in Renton, Washington. I saw that one wing on the wrecked plane was folded back, which meant before the crash it had had only one functional wing, which would have caused it to spin down like a lawn dart. The wrecker moved the remains of the fuselage, which exposed the badly mangled bodies of two Oregonians, the pilot and his passenger.

I drove to my house, beyond which smoke billowed in the opposite direction of the crash, up Horizon Drive. I followed the smoke and discovered it came from the remains of another aircraft, this one a Beechcraft Model V36. The plane, which had four Boiseans on board, had collided midair with the Cessna.

It had lost about half of its left wing, and it was obvious to me the pilot had been trying to stay in the air by running the engine full throttle. It would have been going faster than 110 mph when it bellied into the hillside. Both these wreckages were about one-quarter mile from my house, the Cessna to the west and the Beech to the east.

 The men on board the Beechcraft all died. To me as a pilot, one of the saddest aspects of this second crash was the impact had crushed the cockpit to such an extent that only one of the four could escape the plane. But the feet of this sole possible survivor were mangled, which forced him to try to crawl away from the front of the plane to safety. The ruptured fuel tanks spread the fuel ahead of the plane. If he had crawled to the side or to the rear, he might have had a chance to live.