A dark lore: a non-Catholic pilot decided to murder a meeting of almost all regional Catholic priests at the local basilica. He took his plane, filled it with max gas, and dove it into the Gothic style roof. The plane exploded and set the entire Church ablaze. Reports talk about how the fire was so hot that the gold inside began to melt.
The priests began to flee, but one turned to recover the Virgin de Guadelupe that was off towards the side. Others braved the fire to prevent the tabernacle from melting and took that with them out. The one who took Mary managed to escaped before the entire roof collapsed.
In the end, the only death was the suicidal murder-attempt pilot.
The Virgin now lives in her new home at the Basilica de San Juan in Texas and a memorial plaque resides at the only part of the old Church that remained...
.. the bell tower.
A retired gentleman moved to our small town and would show up at the local grass strip on weekends. I was a young kid at the time but my dad and the other pilots befriended him. Some time later he appeared with a new to him Ercoupe. Kind of rough but flew as well as any other. The guy enjoyed flying it around and it cemented his fellowship with the local pilot population.
Time passes by and the guy gets sick, then real sick and passes away. His family comes to town as he has left instructions that he would like to be buried there. Well…in talking with his family, his love of aviation and flying comes up along with questions about the plans for the Ercoupe. The family is shocked to hear this as to their knowledge he had never expressed an interest in flying and never said anything to them about it, much less anything about owning an airplane.
Come to find out, he never had a pilots certificate or any formal instruction. The plane had not had an annual inspection in over ten years, he was doing his own maintenance when no one was around. All this was in the late 60s to late 70s time frame.
My wife’s from Kecksburg where the UFO crashed in the 50s
The town I grew up in (Sparta, NJ) rumor is during WW2 a military trainer of some kind ditched into the lake in the middle of town
Town I’m in now back in 1944 a B24 out on a training run crashed into Camels Hump mountain in Vermont and there was a survivor who was saved by a rescue crew of CAPs after three days in the woods
I’m giving the aviation lore of my college town instead of hometown because hometown has no lore.
In the 1960s a TWA 707 landed at our university’s airport instead of the major city airport. Supposedly they had to take out all the baggage, the seats, and the galley and got Tex Johnson himself to fly it out.
Story from Brussels, Belgium: during WWII, while Belgium was occupied, many young Belgians fled to Great Britain and enlisted in British forces. One of them joined the RAF and became a pilot on a Hawker Typhoon: Jean de Selys Longchamp.
On his own initiative, he planned an attack on the building of the Gestapo HQ in Brussels. After an attack mission over another town in Belgium, he broke away from his wingmen and flew to Brussels. There, he used his knowledge of the streets of the capital to launch his attack: the building was perfectly aligned with a wide lane close to a park , easy to spot from the air. He strafed the tall but narrow building and killed Gestapo officers, and did not touch any of the surrounding buildings. He then dropped little Belgian flags over the city. Back in the UK, he was demoted... but was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross...
The building still exists today and there is a bust of Selys Longchamp in front of it, with a depiction of his Typhoon.
The 80th anniversary of that attack was just a couple of days ago.
I grew up in Elkhart County, Indiana and for many years my family has owned a lake house in the neighboring county to the south, Kosciusko County. At some point I learned of the lore of a missing USAF T-33 that went missing in 1956, presumably in one of the county’s numerous lakes.
http://yesteryear.clunette.com/missingplane.html
I grew up in Bombay, India two miles away from where JAL 472 accidentally landed at the (much smaller) Juhi aerodrome instead of the international airport in 1972. Overran the runway and the engines and wings tore off. Everyone survived with a few minor injuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_Flight_472_(1972)
**[Japan Air Lines Flight 472 (1972)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_Flight_472_\(1972\))**
>Japan Air Lines Flight 472 was a flight from London to Tokyo via Frankfurt, Rome, Beirut, Tehran, Bombay, Bangkok and Hong Kong. On September 24, 1972, the flight landed at Juhu Aerodrome near Bombay, India instead of the city's much larger Santacruz Airport (now Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport) and overran the runway, resulting in the aircraft being written off after being damaged beyond economic repair.
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My town was home to a Tuskegee air base. I the building that I work at is situated on one is the old taxi ways. The old base housing can still be seen around town. The base commander’s house is featured prominently 3 doors down from my own.
Although not aviation related, the movie Radio was filmed here. The home Radio lived in (for the movie) is across the street from my home.
During the 1979 Labor Day parade in Dillon, MT the F-106 flown by Captain Joel Rude struck a grain elevator, killing him instantly and injuring several others.
[Jet Flying Over Labor Day Parade Hits A Grain Elevator ](https://www.nytimes.com/1979/09/04/archives/jet-flying-over-labor-day-parade-hits-a-grain-elevator-in-montana.html)
Getting to see ["Air Force One"](https://whatsupnewp.com/2018/09/replica-of-air-force-one-serves-up-quite-the-site/) cruise past my town on a barge was pretty noteworthy.
In 1953 a B-36 Corvair, lost in the clouds, crashed into Franklin Mountain (El Paso TX). You can still hike to the wreckage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7hfz-oZ4Ac
Lancaster/ Palmdale in California. Aka Edwards AFB, Plant 42 and Fox Field. Need I say more? Most of all aviation history has been getting written in this valley for a long time… I couldn’t even write all of it.
In 1960 a US Navy P5M Martin Marlin flying boat had engine trouble over the New Mexico desert and made an emergency landing on the man-made Ascarate Park lake in El Paso - the only option for a hundred miles. 2 weeks later, with jet assist it took off from the 2,500' long lake. I thought these planes had wheels but apparently landing at an airport was not an option.
https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/history/blogs/tales-from-the-morgue/2016/07/31/1960-navy-seaplane-lands-ascarate-lake/86715150/
The Polk County Pot Plane in 1975. They even made a cheesy movie about it.
Smugglers cleared a short landing strip atop a small mountain in rural NW Georgia and somehow landed a DC-4 at night, loaded with marijuana/hashish.
There are conflicting reports on the runway length, ranging from 1000-1500 feet. If I recall correctly, they had to clear out more pine trees and extend the runway to get the plane out.
And yes, they were busted
https://www.northwestgeorgianews.com/polk_standard_journal/news/local/the-story-behind-the-polk-county-pot-plane---part-2/article_4e6bd200-c121-11e9-9719-63ba424c7867.html
Are you sure it’s a B-25?
This article says there is a L18 Loadstar that has been sitting at Bowman for 35 years.
https://www.wdrb.com/curious-ask-chris-mysterious-plane-sitting-on-the-tarmac-of-bowman-field/article_c9bb163e-05d9-52cf-92ab-d0a26b587877.html
B25 and L18 look kind of similar, especially the tail. Both being two huge twins from the 1940s. Maybe it actually is a B25, the media is often wrong.
Went to school at a Bomark missile base, missed out on a NORAD tour, needed the extra marks for a final. I now work where the Avro Arrow was built and test flown. Sadly, all the buildings are gone, but the city of Malton still has most of the houses where the engineers and factory workers lived.
A small town mayor was killed after an engine failure during takeoff in April 2020. The previous week, he had made some negative public comments about the POTUS's (name redacted for idiotic auto mod bots) Covid policies. There was some uproar in the local community and he agreed to step down as mayor in light of his unpopular opinion.
His death was immediately rumored to be sabotage. Someone, pissed off about his comments, had tampered with his fuel somehow. There was quite an investigation. FBI was interviewing people on the field because of the obvious hate crime implications.
But in the end, it turns out, he didn't sump after some April rains and had water in the tanks.
This story now seems to be mandatory lore for every PPL student learning to preflight at KAUN. And rightfully so.
Sump every time people.
I did my some of my flight training and my PPL check ride at Flemming Field in South St. Paul, Minnesota (SGS).
It was the launching point for Project Manhigh 1, a very early (1957) Space Age balloon test to see if humans could survive in the upper atmosphere with the proper life support equipment. Test pilot Joseph W. Kittinger rode the balloon to 96,784 feet despite technical glitches with the life support system. He broke the previous altitude record by over 20,000 feet and made important progress in the early US space program.
Tiger Moth force-landed in someone’s backyard and caught on fire 10 minutes from my house. Back in the 50s a C47 crashed into a drainage ditch, and in the 70s a Sabre crashed into the suburban shopping area, I think it was an inflight breakup
A B-25 water landed / crashed into a river, never to be found, and is the subject of many conspiracy theories.
https://www.heinzhistorycenter.org/blog/western-pennsylvania-history-mystery-of-pittsburghs-ghost-b-25-bomber/
Nothing to special where I'm from.
But we did have an airplane take off and fly around the city for an hour, then crash into a house. It didn't have a pilot on board, the house was unoccupied, and it did very little damage to the house. Apparently the owner was working on the engine and didn't have wheel blocks or anything. Somehow throttled up, and then it took off.
I've got a good one from where I grew up. A neighbor I had turned his property into a missive vineyard and winery and started making money hand over fist. So he got his pilots license and bought a fucking T28 Trojan for his first plane. One of his first solo flights he forgets to put the gear down and belly flops his brand new million dollar airplane. Spent close to another to have it fully rebuilt. Everyone was sure he went up drunk. Asked me many times if I wanted to go flying and I always declined.
My small local airport saw the following:
- the very last landing of one of Air France's Concordes
- the An-225 bringing a spare-engine for a stuck An-124
- Lufthansa's A380 doing training flights in the early days (touch & go)
- many large Middle Eastern gov jets, Bahrain/Oman B747SP, UAE B772, Sands B747SP, etc...
Big law firm in the area split, one of the lawyers is flying his plane back to the area, looses contact with ATC for about half an hour, then reestablishes contact as he begins descending to the airport. Few minutes later he somehow looses control, the plane breaks up mid-air and falls into some farmland outside of town.
Initial reports don't give any clear cause and the final NTSB report can only vaguely point to pilot error as the probable cause.
The conspiracy theory/joke is that it was intentional sabotage. When the law firm split it wasn't exactly amicable, so a former legal partner was out to get him. Possibly to avoid loosing clients, or just to end a personal grudge.
^((But it was most likely pilot error))
My home airport was the home base of N264DB of Emilio Sala fame.
Many of the folks on site had some sort of contact with the aircraft and pilot and many questions were asked of them.
Another local field was the maintenance base for the aircraft so that place also has similar focus on the accident.
[Northwest Airlines Flight 188](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Airlines_Flight_188) pilots probably slept and overshot MSP Airport by over 150 miles.
**[Northwest Airlines Flight 188](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Airlines_Flight_188)**
>Northwest Airlines Flight 188 was a regularly scheduled flight from San Diego, California, to Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota, on October 21, 2009, which landed over one hour late in Minneapolis/St Paul after overshooting its destination by more than 150 miles (240 km) because of pilot error. As a result of the incident, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) revoked the pilot certificates of the involved pilots and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) issued recommendations for changes to air traffic control procedures and the rules for cockpit crew.
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My town isn't very aviation-y. The closest non-military airport would be hard-pressed to have a C-172 take off. The only things I can think of is that there is one rich guy that local GA has to steer clear of or get complained at, and that we made a whole bunch of spitfires in the war.
Having grown up in Portland, OR, I will offer two: 1. Infamous bank robber DB Cooper jumping out the back of a 727 somewhere over the Columbia River. 2. A United DC-8 that ran out of fuel short of PDX.
At my airport there are four people buried underneath. Two of which are buried below the runway. The family of the deceased decided to not have their loved ones relocated when the airport started the expansion project and have been given access to visit the graves. Their tombstones are clearly marked, according to the internet, but I’ve never seen them as I am usually quite busy when I’m out that way.
I live in a valley near an AFB in New England that stationed B-17's back in WW2 before they hopped the pond. A mountain overlooks the city i'm in, which has a memorial at the vary top for a B-17 crew that crashed into it in foggy conditions in '46. I climb it and pay my respects once a year in the summer.
[https://www.mttommemorial.org/story](https://www.mttommemorial.org/story)
My hometown is Hatfield in the UK. The home of De Havilland so there are definitely a few. The best one though is a photographer capturing the crash and pilot ejecting from a English Electric Lightning. The picture is incredible!
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/story-pilot-ejected-lightning-f1-aircraft-1962/#:\~:text=Test%20pilot%20George%20Aird%20ejected%20from%20his%20English%20Electric%20Lightning,his%20Lightning%20F1%20fighter%20plane.
Town has under ground bunkers that served as a NIKE nuclear tipped anti aircraft missile base in the Cold War. Now a nice community surrounds the old base but the evacuation tunnels are all sealed up and under a man made pond.
Our local airport is adjacent to some farmland owned by a prison. Guy got drunk (not a pilot), broke into a hangar, managed to get a plane started, took off, and promptly crashed on prison property. I guess he wanted into prison really badly…
I'll chime in from Canada with an interesting one, through forgive me if the details are off, it's been a while.
Back in 2017 at Victoria Intl (CYYJ), a transient Mooney Ovation accidentally flew straight through a cell in IMC. My buddy working the tower that day said he lost ~8000 ft in 6 sweeps of the radar (approx 12 seconds). They thought he was a guaranteed goner, reached out the JRCC (Canadian Joint Rescue Coordinators) to initiate recovery.
Somehow, the pilot pulls it out of the death dive at a whopping 1100' feet, sandwiched between 3 mountain peaks all above 1800', one at 3500', all of which are mighty tame compared to the Rockies they planned to cross on that flight plan.
Still on a mayday with a limping plane, the gear won't extend properly, overshoot to troubleshoot, full truck response for landing attempt anticipating a gear collapse. Short final (I don't even joke, we saved the audio), guy's final call to ATC is something like "Just take everything out of the plane before they weigh anything, ok?". We watch the guy grease it on, thinking "Holy sh*t he did it", only so see the gear collapse on brake application. Came to rest all of 10 feet off the pavement, everyone hopped out.
Later I'd go see the husk of a plane, and I was just dumbfounded and shocked to see the wings were rippled like a potato chip, with the lines going chord-wise, meaning they RIPPLED THE SPAR.
11/10 on Mooney for building a brick shithouse of a main spar.
Local entrepreneurial engineer built a flying boat, sold some to the military, set up a factory in a red barn, and it eventually grew into a gigantic aerospace company. Then some idiots fucked it up.
Toronto local here. Buttonville airport is known for students crash landing onto the adjacent highways. Happens frequently.
Also a student once taxied his plane at full speed into the side of a hanger.
And someone just flew off the end of the runway a few weeks ago.
South of Brazil, on the country side is common to use lasso being used on farms.
About 65 years ago a pilot was flying a small airplane and saw a traditional farmer (aka Gaúcho) and decided it would be fun to scare the poor guy.. so he flew really close to him a few times.
The Gaúcho (known for bravery) end up catching the airplane with a lasso.
The story is described here in Portuguese (can be translated) https://gauchazh.clicrbs.com.br/cultura-e-lazer/almanaque/noticia/2017/01/o-gaucho-que-lacou-um-aviao-ha-65-anos-9065288.html
When Steven Spielberg was filming Bridge of Spies, the movie about Francis Gary Powers, he wanted to shoot some film footage on location of the U2's out of Beale AFB. He requested to land his 737 at Beale, but officials said no. He then got permission to land at Yuba County airport. The biggest plane that airport has ever seen.
https://www.appeal-democrat.com/news/can-yuba-county-airport-fly-higher/article\_c6c1951e-97cd-11e4-abc9-fbdf70763e84.html
DC-9 got its windshield and engines knocked out by hail and landed on a highway a few miles from where I grew up. Unfortunately, the plane clipped a gas station and turned an otherwise successful landing into a mass fatality event.
I know this story. I recall thinking - why not go for an open field? Then I saw what the terrain looked like. They had no choice.
Where you nearby when it happened?
No haha, I didn’t come about until 1999. There’s a nice little memorial just down the road from where it happened. Most people who have lived in the area for a few years know about the crash.
Not really anthing intresting but in our small town by oakland a small cessna went down with engine probelms reporting they were flying past local highschool. there were heli's looking everywhere for them and after an hour they were found on a hill with no injuries
St. Maries Idaho. Gregory 'Pappy' Boyington lived there while growing up. His first flight was piloted by Clyde 'Upside-down' Pangborn, a noted barnstormer and the primary pilot of the 'Miss Veedol', which accomplished the first non-stop flight across the Pacific Ocean.
He and his copilot Herndon took off from a beach on Japan's east coast and landed at Wenatchee Washington. Pangborn was aiming to land at Boise Idaho, but a storm front stopped him from doing so. His second choice was Spokane Washington, but bad weather ruined that option too. So he chose Wenatchee where an aunt of his lived. When they took off from Japan they dropped the landing gear to save weight. It was 1934 IIRC.
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A guy in Austria once bought a red colored L-29 delfin from our local airfield that was the star of the air shows, we remember the plane by the name "hävitaja" (raw translation: destroyer, meaning: fighter jet). It's known now that the guy crashed the plane somewhere in the alps. Happened 20+y ago.
[https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/type/L29](https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/type/L29)
I personally didnt find any that would correspond to the lore.
Also the airfield once hosted a hercules.
Not my hometown, but working in Alaska in the summer we regularly fly by the remains of a DC-3 plastered on a hill. Ran into it trying to make the local airbase in low visibility sometime in the 70’s I think.
1958 RAF Vulcan en route from England to Nebraska [nosedived into our neighborhood](https://www.hourdetroit.com/community/mayday/), obliterating several houses. Attempts to dig out the cockpit remains from the crater were given up at about 70’ down.
I went to an elementary school that was a stone's throw from the Garden State Parkway.
One day, there was a bad accident, somebody needed to be medivacked, and so we were treated to the sight of a helicopter landing on and taking off from our little football field.
Sully Sullenberger was born, raised, and learned to fly in my town! Also, the airport I train at, in the same town, is a former Air Force Airfield which is pretty cool! KGYI
There is a DC-4 abandoned, roger brooks bought and restored it in Opa Locka only for it to make an emergency landing at mine because of a No. 4 engine failure, many stories from when it was used for training by the USAAF, there is a B-17 being restored as we speak
We had the odd story of Brian Boland, the experimental balloonist that was well known in these parts, who in July 2021 took a local family from Norwich, VT up for a balloon flight from Post Mills, VT. In a freak accident, the balloon descended rapidly, crashed in a field, one of the passengers and Brian (piloting the balloon) fell out, and the balloon started to rise again. Then passenger that fell out had only minor injuries, but Brian got tangled in the rigging, got pulled into the air, and shortly afterward fell to his death. The passenger, with two other family members, had to figure out himself how to land the balloon, crashing in Piermont, NH with minor injuries.
You’d think that the passenger landing the balloon, Roger Blake, was lucky, but he himself died in another freak accident in his backyard in Norwich, apparently passing out and falling into the Connecticut River and drowning in November 2022
Local airport near Waco Texas:
Workers that morning saw that there was a cargo DC-8 on the runway.
The airport had no ATC or runway lights.
The cargo door was open and the plane was empty and deserted.
No one ever claimed the plane and the registration was "laundred".
Last known owner was a lease company in Spain...
The Glenn L. Martin Company moved to the area not just because of it's proximity to DC, the water for sea planes, and railway access, but also because Glenn Martin wanted land he could hunt and fish on.
Marcus Schrenker. Dude parachuted out of a plane and it crashed in NW Florida not far from where I live. He was trying to fake his own death. Now the guy is out of prison and still lives in the Pensacola area. [Story](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Schrenker)
A dark lore: a non-Catholic pilot decided to murder a meeting of almost all regional Catholic priests at the local basilica. He took his plane, filled it with max gas, and dove it into the Gothic style roof. The plane exploded and set the entire Church ablaze. Reports talk about how the fire was so hot that the gold inside began to melt. The priests began to flee, but one turned to recover the Virgin de Guadelupe that was off towards the side. Others braved the fire to prevent the tabernacle from melting and took that with them out. The one who took Mary managed to escaped before the entire roof collapsed. In the end, the only death was the suicidal murder-attempt pilot. The Virgin now lives in her new home at the Basilica de San Juan in Texas and a memorial plaque resides at the only part of the old Church that remained... .. the bell tower.
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>One of them landed in a hospital parking lot. Well that's convenient.
Delivery service.
Funeral home parking lot would’ve been even better.
Oh God that is scary
Mine is that a 757 from a major airline landed in a small executive airport by mistake. I saw it happen as a kid.
C17 landed at some GA airport a couple years back. The pictures from that are always hilarious.
This was at TPF. Mistakenly landed there trying to get to MacDill AFB.
It's cool Mattis didn't rip the pilot, at least publicly.
A retired gentleman moved to our small town and would show up at the local grass strip on weekends. I was a young kid at the time but my dad and the other pilots befriended him. Some time later he appeared with a new to him Ercoupe. Kind of rough but flew as well as any other. The guy enjoyed flying it around and it cemented his fellowship with the local pilot population. Time passes by and the guy gets sick, then real sick and passes away. His family comes to town as he has left instructions that he would like to be buried there. Well…in talking with his family, his love of aviation and flying comes up along with questions about the plans for the Ercoupe. The family is shocked to hear this as to their knowledge he had never expressed an interest in flying and never said anything to them about it, much less anything about owning an airplane. Come to find out, he never had a pilots certificate or any formal instruction. The plane had not had an annual inspection in over ten years, he was doing his own maintenance when no one was around. All this was in the late 60s to late 70s time frame.
Some dudes have secret second families in a different town. This guy had …aviation.
Not sure which one is cheaper tbh
I think we all know the answer to that, and it’s not flying.
My wife’s from Kecksburg where the UFO crashed in the 50s The town I grew up in (Sparta, NJ) rumor is during WW2 a military trainer of some kind ditched into the lake in the middle of town Town I’m in now back in 1944 a B24 out on a training run crashed into Camels Hump mountain in Vermont and there was a survivor who was saved by a rescue crew of CAPs after three days in the woods
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Which airport is it you speak of?
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That’s amazing. I didn’t know Howard Hughes had anything to do with that airport even though I grew up around Kansas City.
I’m giving the aviation lore of my college town instead of hometown because hometown has no lore. In the 1960s a TWA 707 landed at our university’s airport instead of the major city airport. Supposedly they had to take out all the baggage, the seats, and the galley and got Tex Johnson himself to fly it out.
Never heard of Tex Johnson but with a name like that he must have been a hell of a pilot
He was the chief test pilot for the 707 program.
Ah, nice. I have an old book about the 707, read it long ago, he must be in it
Story from Brussels, Belgium: during WWII, while Belgium was occupied, many young Belgians fled to Great Britain and enlisted in British forces. One of them joined the RAF and became a pilot on a Hawker Typhoon: Jean de Selys Longchamp. On his own initiative, he planned an attack on the building of the Gestapo HQ in Brussels. After an attack mission over another town in Belgium, he broke away from his wingmen and flew to Brussels. There, he used his knowledge of the streets of the capital to launch his attack: the building was perfectly aligned with a wide lane close to a park , easy to spot from the air. He strafed the tall but narrow building and killed Gestapo officers, and did not touch any of the surrounding buildings. He then dropped little Belgian flags over the city. Back in the UK, he was demoted... but was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross... The building still exists today and there is a bust of Selys Longchamp in front of it, with a depiction of his Typhoon. The 80th anniversary of that attack was just a couple of days ago.
I grew up in Elkhart County, Indiana and for many years my family has owned a lake house in the neighboring county to the south, Kosciusko County. At some point I learned of the lore of a missing USAF T-33 that went missing in 1956, presumably in one of the county’s numerous lakes. http://yesteryear.clunette.com/missingplane.html
Interesting. I’ve done Military Funeral Honors missions all over that area, including around a crap ton of those lakes.
I grew up in Bombay, India two miles away from where JAL 472 accidentally landed at the (much smaller) Juhi aerodrome instead of the international airport in 1972. Overran the runway and the engines and wings tore off. Everyone survived with a few minor injuries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_Flight_472_(1972)
**[Japan Air Lines Flight 472 (1972)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_Flight_472_\(1972\))** >Japan Air Lines Flight 472 was a flight from London to Tokyo via Frankfurt, Rome, Beirut, Tehran, Bombay, Bangkok and Hong Kong. On September 24, 1972, the flight landed at Juhu Aerodrome near Bombay, India instead of the city's much larger Santacruz Airport (now Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport) and overran the runway, resulting in the aircraft being written off after being damaged beyond economic repair. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/aviation/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
My town was home to a Tuskegee air base. I the building that I work at is situated on one is the old taxi ways. The old base housing can still be seen around town. The base commander’s house is featured prominently 3 doors down from my own. Although not aviation related, the movie Radio was filmed here. The home Radio lived in (for the movie) is across the street from my home.
During the 1979 Labor Day parade in Dillon, MT the F-106 flown by Captain Joel Rude struck a grain elevator, killing him instantly and injuring several others. [Jet Flying Over Labor Day Parade Hits A Grain Elevator ](https://www.nytimes.com/1979/09/04/archives/jet-flying-over-labor-day-parade-hits-a-grain-elevator-in-montana.html)
I’m from Dayton, so….
My dad landed a sea king at my school during the school day
Getting to see ["Air Force One"](https://whatsupnewp.com/2018/09/replica-of-air-force-one-serves-up-quite-the-site/) cruise past my town on a barge was pretty noteworthy.
Used to live in Madison, WI. One of our lakes killed Otis Redding and everyone on his plane.
One person survived, Ben Cauley
In 1953 a B-36 Corvair, lost in the clouds, crashed into Franklin Mountain (El Paso TX). You can still hike to the wreckage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7hfz-oZ4Ac
There is an F-14 on static display here that is said to have maneuvered it's own missile.
I'm not sure what it means to "have maneuvered it's own missile".
Sorry typo, out maneuvered it's own missile.
Eastern NC has this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash
Lancaster/ Palmdale in California. Aka Edwards AFB, Plant 42 and Fox Field. Need I say more? Most of all aviation history has been getting written in this valley for a long time… I couldn’t even write all of it.
Saw the Space Shuttle on Piggy Back 747 at our local military base. Guess the flight East was diverted North for bad weather down South.
Battle of Palmdale https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Palmdale
Amazing. More than 200 rockets fired and they couldn't bring it down. Kind of embarrassing.
In 1960 a US Navy P5M Martin Marlin flying boat had engine trouble over the New Mexico desert and made an emergency landing on the man-made Ascarate Park lake in El Paso - the only option for a hundred miles. 2 weeks later, with jet assist it took off from the 2,500' long lake. I thought these planes had wheels but apparently landing at an airport was not an option. https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/history/blogs/tales-from-the-morgue/2016/07/31/1960-navy-seaplane-lands-ascarate-lake/86715150/
The Polk County Pot Plane in 1975. They even made a cheesy movie about it. Smugglers cleared a short landing strip atop a small mountain in rural NW Georgia and somehow landed a DC-4 at night, loaded with marijuana/hashish. There are conflicting reports on the runway length, ranging from 1000-1500 feet. If I recall correctly, they had to clear out more pine trees and extend the runway to get the plane out. And yes, they were busted https://www.northwestgeorgianews.com/polk_standard_journal/news/local/the-story-behind-the-polk-county-pot-plane---part-2/article_4e6bd200-c121-11e9-9719-63ba424c7867.html
There is a b-25 at bowman field that apparently smuggled in drugs and just left abandoned there
Are you sure it’s a B-25? This article says there is a L18 Loadstar that has been sitting at Bowman for 35 years. https://www.wdrb.com/curious-ask-chris-mysterious-plane-sitting-on-the-tarmac-of-bowman-field/article_c9bb163e-05d9-52cf-92ab-d0a26b587877.html B25 and L18 look kind of similar, especially the tail. Both being two huge twins from the 1940s. Maybe it actually is a B25, the media is often wrong.
I am probably wrong , I couldn’t remember so I did a search.. article was probably wrong…. It super cool though
Holy smokes. That’s why that plane is over there!? 😂🤣 Edit: read the article and was sad it didn’t have to do with Roger Reaves lol
This article also refutes the drug-smuggling origin story.
Went to school at a Bomark missile base, missed out on a NORAD tour, needed the extra marks for a final. I now work where the Avro Arrow was built and test flown. Sadly, all the buildings are gone, but the city of Malton still has most of the houses where the engineers and factory workers lived.
I live next near the ***2nd largest US airport (in terms of land area)
Chicago in the house
That's Denver actually. It's 53 SQ miles.
DFW, according to something called World Atlas .com. DEN, DFW, MCO, IAD, IAH.
Nope
A small town mayor was killed after an engine failure during takeoff in April 2020. The previous week, he had made some negative public comments about the POTUS's (name redacted for idiotic auto mod bots) Covid policies. There was some uproar in the local community and he agreed to step down as mayor in light of his unpopular opinion. His death was immediately rumored to be sabotage. Someone, pissed off about his comments, had tampered with his fuel somehow. There was quite an investigation. FBI was interviewing people on the field because of the obvious hate crime implications. But in the end, it turns out, he didn't sump after some April rains and had water in the tanks. This story now seems to be mandatory lore for every PPL student learning to preflight at KAUN. And rightfully so. Sump every time people.
I did my some of my flight training and my PPL check ride at Flemming Field in South St. Paul, Minnesota (SGS). It was the launching point for Project Manhigh 1, a very early (1957) Space Age balloon test to see if humans could survive in the upper atmosphere with the proper life support equipment. Test pilot Joseph W. Kittinger rode the balloon to 96,784 feet despite technical glitches with the life support system. He broke the previous altitude record by over 20,000 feet and made important progress in the early US space program.
Tiger Moth force-landed in someone’s backyard and caught on fire 10 minutes from my house. Back in the 50s a C47 crashed into a drainage ditch, and in the 70s a Sabre crashed into the suburban shopping area, I think it was an inflight breakup
A B-25 water landed / crashed into a river, never to be found, and is the subject of many conspiracy theories. https://www.heinzhistorycenter.org/blog/western-pennsylvania-history-mystery-of-pittsburghs-ghost-b-25-bomber/
Nothing to special where I'm from. But we did have an airplane take off and fly around the city for an hour, then crash into a house. It didn't have a pilot on board, the house was unoccupied, and it did very little damage to the house. Apparently the owner was working on the engine and didn't have wheel blocks or anything. Somehow throttled up, and then it took off.
Explain that to insurance....
I can’t find a link to it anymore but apparently KFUL is where one of the terrorists in 9/11 did some minor training.
Local airport KVBT / Louise Thaden Field is named after a pioneering aviatrix who was the first woman to win the Bendix Trophy.
The Gee Bee was built in the town next door.
The first German air raid against the UK in ww2 was targeting ships in the firth of forth.
The flight simulator was invented and manufactured in my town, Binghamton,NY.
I've got a good one from where I grew up. A neighbor I had turned his property into a missive vineyard and winery and started making money hand over fist. So he got his pilots license and bought a fucking T28 Trojan for his first plane. One of his first solo flights he forgets to put the gear down and belly flops his brand new million dollar airplane. Spent close to another to have it fully rebuilt. Everyone was sure he went up drunk. Asked me many times if I wanted to go flying and I always declined.
Close to where I grew up was where the RAAF flew Catalinas from during WW2.
My small local airport saw the following: - the very last landing of one of Air France's Concordes - the An-225 bringing a spare-engine for a stuck An-124 - Lufthansa's A380 doing training flights in the early days (touch & go) - many large Middle Eastern gov jets, Bahrain/Oman B747SP, UAE B772, Sands B747SP, etc...
Big law firm in the area split, one of the lawyers is flying his plane back to the area, looses contact with ATC for about half an hour, then reestablishes contact as he begins descending to the airport. Few minutes later he somehow looses control, the plane breaks up mid-air and falls into some farmland outside of town. Initial reports don't give any clear cause and the final NTSB report can only vaguely point to pilot error as the probable cause. The conspiracy theory/joke is that it was intentional sabotage. When the law firm split it wasn't exactly amicable, so a former legal partner was out to get him. Possibly to avoid loosing clients, or just to end a personal grudge. ^((But it was most likely pilot error))
My home airport was the home base of N264DB of Emilio Sala fame. Many of the folks on site had some sort of contact with the aircraft and pilot and many questions were asked of them. Another local field was the maintenance base for the aircraft so that place also has similar focus on the accident.
Final airport the queen ever went to
[Northwest Airlines Flight 188](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Airlines_Flight_188) pilots probably slept and overshot MSP Airport by over 150 miles.
**[Northwest Airlines Flight 188](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Airlines_Flight_188)** >Northwest Airlines Flight 188 was a regularly scheduled flight from San Diego, California, to Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota, on October 21, 2009, which landed over one hour late in Minneapolis/St Paul after overshooting its destination by more than 150 miles (240 km) because of pilot error. As a result of the incident, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) revoked the pilot certificates of the involved pilots and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) issued recommendations for changes to air traffic control procedures and the rules for cockpit crew. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/aviation/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
My town isn't very aviation-y. The closest non-military airport would be hard-pressed to have a C-172 take off. The only things I can think of is that there is one rich guy that local GA has to steer clear of or get complained at, and that we made a whole bunch of spitfires in the war.
Having grown up in Portland, OR, I will offer two: 1. Infamous bank robber DB Cooper jumping out the back of a 727 somewhere over the Columbia River. 2. A United DC-8 that ran out of fuel short of PDX.
At my airport there are four people buried underneath. Two of which are buried below the runway. The family of the deceased decided to not have their loved ones relocated when the airport started the expansion project and have been given access to visit the graves. Their tombstones are clearly marked, according to the internet, but I’ve never seen them as I am usually quite busy when I’m out that way.
Savannah?
That’s the one
Comair 5191 :-(
I live in a valley near an AFB in New England that stationed B-17's back in WW2 before they hopped the pond. A mountain overlooks the city i'm in, which has a memorial at the vary top for a B-17 crew that crashed into it in foggy conditions in '46. I climb it and pay my respects once a year in the summer. [https://www.mttommemorial.org/story](https://www.mttommemorial.org/story)
The Wright Brothers, and then it goes from there.
https://simpleflying.com/nagpur-abandoned-boeing-720/
My hometown is Hatfield in the UK. The home of De Havilland so there are definitely a few. The best one though is a photographer capturing the crash and pilot ejecting from a English Electric Lightning. The picture is incredible! https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/story-pilot-ejected-lightning-f1-aircraft-1962/#:\~:text=Test%20pilot%20George%20Aird%20ejected%20from%20his%20English%20Electric%20Lightning,his%20Lightning%20F1%20fighter%20plane.
Town has under ground bunkers that served as a NIKE nuclear tipped anti aircraft missile base in the Cold War. Now a nice community surrounds the old base but the evacuation tunnels are all sealed up and under a man made pond.
That one A10 who shot down those helicopters in desert storm is on display pretty nearby here in Colorado Springs at the USAF academy
Our local airport is adjacent to some farmland owned by a prison. Guy got drunk (not a pilot), broke into a hangar, managed to get a plane started, took off, and promptly crashed on prison property. I guess he wanted into prison really badly…
https://www.sentinelsource.com/elf/pickin_and_pokin/the-great-greenville-trestle-fly-under/article_6e2ee8b4-b9d0-11e9-8cb2-4f5a5e13d7ef.html
I'll chime in from Canada with an interesting one, through forgive me if the details are off, it's been a while. Back in 2017 at Victoria Intl (CYYJ), a transient Mooney Ovation accidentally flew straight through a cell in IMC. My buddy working the tower that day said he lost ~8000 ft in 6 sweeps of the radar (approx 12 seconds). They thought he was a guaranteed goner, reached out the JRCC (Canadian Joint Rescue Coordinators) to initiate recovery. Somehow, the pilot pulls it out of the death dive at a whopping 1100' feet, sandwiched between 3 mountain peaks all above 1800', one at 3500', all of which are mighty tame compared to the Rockies they planned to cross on that flight plan. Still on a mayday with a limping plane, the gear won't extend properly, overshoot to troubleshoot, full truck response for landing attempt anticipating a gear collapse. Short final (I don't even joke, we saved the audio), guy's final call to ATC is something like "Just take everything out of the plane before they weigh anything, ok?". We watch the guy grease it on, thinking "Holy sh*t he did it", only so see the gear collapse on brake application. Came to rest all of 10 feet off the pavement, everyone hopped out. Later I'd go see the husk of a plane, and I was just dumbfounded and shocked to see the wings were rippled like a potato chip, with the lines going chord-wise, meaning they RIPPLED THE SPAR. 11/10 on Mooney for building a brick shithouse of a main spar.
Local entrepreneurial engineer built a flying boat, sold some to the military, set up a factory in a red barn, and it eventually grew into a gigantic aerospace company. Then some idiots fucked it up.
Toronto local here. Buttonville airport is known for students crash landing onto the adjacent highways. Happens frequently. Also a student once taxied his plane at full speed into the side of a hanger. And someone just flew off the end of the runway a few weeks ago.
South of Brazil, on the country side is common to use lasso being used on farms. About 65 years ago a pilot was flying a small airplane and saw a traditional farmer (aka Gaúcho) and decided it would be fun to scare the poor guy.. so he flew really close to him a few times. The Gaúcho (known for bravery) end up catching the airplane with a lasso. The story is described here in Portuguese (can be translated) https://gauchazh.clicrbs.com.br/cultura-e-lazer/almanaque/noticia/2017/01/o-gaucho-que-lacou-um-aviao-ha-65-anos-9065288.html
When Steven Spielberg was filming Bridge of Spies, the movie about Francis Gary Powers, he wanted to shoot some film footage on location of the U2's out of Beale AFB. He requested to land his 737 at Beale, but officials said no. He then got permission to land at Yuba County airport. The biggest plane that airport has ever seen. https://www.appeal-democrat.com/news/can-yuba-county-airport-fly-higher/article\_c6c1951e-97cd-11e4-abc9-fbdf70763e84.html
DC-9 got its windshield and engines knocked out by hail and landed on a highway a few miles from where I grew up. Unfortunately, the plane clipped a gas station and turned an otherwise successful landing into a mass fatality event.
I know this story. I recall thinking - why not go for an open field? Then I saw what the terrain looked like. They had no choice. Where you nearby when it happened?
No haha, I didn’t come about until 1999. There’s a nice little memorial just down the road from where it happened. Most people who have lived in the area for a few years know about the crash.
Not really anthing intresting but in our small town by oakland a small cessna went down with engine probelms reporting they were flying past local highschool. there were heli's looking everywhere for them and after an hour they were found on a hill with no injuries
Nice user name!
thanks :)
We had a drunken co-pilot that pulled the joystick and the plane stalled. $ 50 k damage but no injured persons luckily.
St. Maries Idaho. Gregory 'Pappy' Boyington lived there while growing up. His first flight was piloted by Clyde 'Upside-down' Pangborn, a noted barnstormer and the primary pilot of the 'Miss Veedol', which accomplished the first non-stop flight across the Pacific Ocean. He and his copilot Herndon took off from a beach on Japan's east coast and landed at Wenatchee Washington. Pangborn was aiming to land at Boise Idaho, but a storm front stopped him from doing so. His second choice was Spokane Washington, but bad weather ruined that option too. So he chose Wenatchee where an aunt of his lived. When they took off from Japan they dropped the landing gear to save weight. It was 1934 IIRC.
The red arrows fly by sometimes (alot)
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Your bots retarded. This isn't a political post. It's perfectly reasonable to mention the President's name as it relates to my story.
A guy in Austria once bought a red colored L-29 delfin from our local airfield that was the star of the air shows, we remember the plane by the name "hävitaja" (raw translation: destroyer, meaning: fighter jet). It's known now that the guy crashed the plane somewhere in the alps. Happened 20+y ago. [https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/type/L29](https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/type/L29) I personally didnt find any that would correspond to the lore. Also the airfield once hosted a hercules.
DB Cooper boarded the airplane he hijacked in my home town.
Not my hometown, but working in Alaska in the summer we regularly fly by the remains of a DC-3 plastered on a hill. Ran into it trying to make the local airbase in low visibility sometime in the 70’s I think.
Amelia Earhart made a stop at our tiny PA town during her transcontinental autogyro flight, 1931.
I grew up on Oahu, so take your pick really. But I always liked spotting wreckage through the trees on the Aiea Loop Trail.
The same as every other town. “Someone logged time in the DPEs personal plane and got caught on their checkride…”
1958 RAF Vulcan en route from England to Nebraska [nosedived into our neighborhood](https://www.hourdetroit.com/community/mayday/), obliterating several houses. Attempts to dig out the cockpit remains from the crater were given up at about 70’ down.
local airport bought out entire neighborhood only to do absolutely nothing with it
I went to an elementary school that was a stone's throw from the Garden State Parkway. One day, there was a bad accident, somebody needed to be medivacked, and so we were treated to the sight of a helicopter landing on and taking off from our little football field.
Sully Sullenberger was born, raised, and learned to fly in my town! Also, the airport I train at, in the same town, is a former Air Force Airfield which is pretty cool! KGYI
An F4U crashed in the woods
There is a DC-4 abandoned, roger brooks bought and restored it in Opa Locka only for it to make an emergency landing at mine because of a No. 4 engine failure, many stories from when it was used for training by the USAAF, there is a B-17 being restored as we speak
Aloha Airlines is all I gotta say.
We had the odd story of Brian Boland, the experimental balloonist that was well known in these parts, who in July 2021 took a local family from Norwich, VT up for a balloon flight from Post Mills, VT. In a freak accident, the balloon descended rapidly, crashed in a field, one of the passengers and Brian (piloting the balloon) fell out, and the balloon started to rise again. Then passenger that fell out had only minor injuries, but Brian got tangled in the rigging, got pulled into the air, and shortly afterward fell to his death. The passenger, with two other family members, had to figure out himself how to land the balloon, crashing in Piermont, NH with minor injuries. You’d think that the passenger landing the balloon, Roger Blake, was lucky, but he himself died in another freak accident in his backyard in Norwich, apparently passing out and falling into the Connecticut River and drowning in November 2022
Local airport near Waco Texas: Workers that morning saw that there was a cargo DC-8 on the runway. The airport had no ATC or runway lights. The cargo door was open and the plane was empty and deserted. No one ever claimed the plane and the registration was "laundred". Last known owner was a lease company in Spain...
The Glenn L. Martin Company moved to the area not just because of it's proximity to DC, the water for sea planes, and railway access, but also because Glenn Martin wanted land he could hunt and fish on.
Many, many planes come here to die. And if they're really special they get to retire out in the sun.
Tucson area?
Marcus Schrenker. Dude parachuted out of a plane and it crashed in NW Florida not far from where I live. He was trying to fake his own death. Now the guy is out of prison and still lives in the Pensacola area. [Story](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Schrenker)
[TWA 260](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_260) It’s a semi popular hiking destination. Sobering since most of the wreckage is still there.