Flying into a mountain

Topo map: USGS; doomed flight, June, 1965; click on map

CHILDHOOD MEMORIES. I don’t seem to remember much from my childhood. I do remember the family occasionally going to drive-ins to see such movies as “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” (1963), "Prudence and the Pill" (1968) (gosh dad, what's this movie about?) and, later, “Catch-22” (1970).

I really loved Catch-22. I was 14 or 15. I recall talking about it with my dad into the night. He seemed happy that I was moved by the film. He was encouraging me to think, feel.

I vaguely recall one odd moment in 1965, just before my tenth birthday. Very early in the morning, my father woke us up and told us that a big jet had crashed in the mountains, just a few miles away. It had carried soldiers, he said.

It was a foggy, drizzly night. I stared out the window. I really didn't know what this event meant. It seemed to mean a lot to my dad. (Note: there've been over 70 plane crashes in the Santa Ana Mountains in the last century or so.)

LOMA RIDGE. The worst air disaster in California history occurred at 1:46 a.m. on June 25, 1965. A Boeing C-135 Stratolifter was transporting soldiers to Vietnam. The flight had started in New Jersey and had stopped at El Toro Marine Base. It was supposed to continue west to Hickam Air Force Base near Honolulu, but it never got there.

Runway 34R at El Toro Marine Base points north, right into foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains called Loma Ridge, which rises in some places to over 1,500 feet before petering out in the cities of Tustin and Orange.

As Anthony Pignataro explained in an article in 2000,

 

…Marines leaving Runway 34 always made an immediate left turn to avoid the 1,500-foot Loma Ridge that lies just four miles north of the base. The transport aircraft in the 1965 crash didn't do that. Instead, that plane—operating in near-blind conditions just before 2 a.m.—flew straight into the ridge.

Why Air Force Captain William F. Cordell, the aircraft's pilot, did that remains a mystery: the portion of the official Marine Corps accident report detailing causality is redacted (a standard procedure in military crash reports). But local commercial pilots studying the crash surmise that Cordell was about 30 seconds late in banking left—half the time it takes to reheat a cup of coffee in the microwave. (He Who Forgets History is a Damned Fool, 3/9/00)

83 servicemen died. There were no survivors.

Because of the weather, and despite the brilliant orange flash caused by the crash, search and rescue didn’t find the crash site for four hours. It was just 150 feet below the top of the ridge. Just over the ridge was Irvine Lake. (See topo map above and photo below.)

When it hit, the plane was going about 300 mph at about 1,150 feet. Wreckage was strewn for at least a mile.

According to press reports from the time,“…the plane hit below the crest of an S-shaped ridge, tearing into the earth and skidding to the top. The tail apparently catapulted upward, flinging bodies, luggage and wreckage over two higher hills.” The report, in the LA Times, goes on to say; “…the body of a crewman, possibly the pilot, lay in a 10-ft piece of cockpit 300 yards from the impact point. A hunk of wing lay 100 yards closer to impact, and a piece of engine was all that could be identified at the crash point.” (Tragic Trail)

Most available reports of the crash list the number of dead at 84. In fact, however, 83 died. One soldier who was supposed to be on the flight arrived late, too late to stop the plane, but just in time to watch it take off.

"Eighteen seconds later, I saw a ball of orange flame," he later said. The event appears to have ruined this fellow's life. For an account of his experiences, see Nick Schou’s Memorial Daze (OC Weekly, 5/26/05).

(Here’s a link to a UPI story entitled El Toro Marine Air Station, CA Air Disaster Kills 84, published the day after the crash.)

THE EL TORO AIRPORT. According to Pignataro, when, in the 1990s, Big Money types like George Argyros pushed to have the El Toro base converted into a commercial airport, the plan was to keep 34R and have large planes head straight for Loma Ridge, where, with enough effort, they would just barely clear the hill. (See.)

Critics noted the obvious: the 1965 crash. But officials, says Pignataro, “said they’d never heard of the crash,” despite a full-page spread about it in the OC Register (“The Deadliest OC Disaster,” June 24, 1995).

Further, the accident was never mentioned in the county's 1996 Draft Environmental Impact Report.

Pignataro notes that, following the 1965 crash, the Marines “imposed a ban on almost all transport flights from Runway 34.”

It’s Orange County, Jake.

From OC History Roundup: site of the crash, near Irvine Lake, Santiago Canyon Rd.

* * * * *

FLIGHT OF THE P-1. Less than two weeks after the Loma Ridge disaster, another plane crash occurred, this one in Imperial County—that’s east of San Diego County, alongside the Arizona border. The crash took the life of famed stunt pilot and Balboa Island resident Paul Mantz.

Mantz was filming the final scenes of Robert Aldrich’s action-adventure movie, “The Flight of the Phoenix,” a childhood favorite:

Flying sequences for the film would be provided by Tallmantz Aviation Inc., the popular motion-picture stunt-flying company run by legendary movie pilots Frank Tallman and Paul Mantz. The company, formed in 1961, was based out of Orange County Airport … and had provided Hollywood filmmakers with a number of thrilling aeronautical feats and stunts, including the ones performed in 1963’s It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, in which Frank Tallman flew a plane … through an open-ended airport hanger, a highway billboard (advertising Coca-Cola) and, once finally on the ground, into the glass-sided wall of an airport restaurant. (Notable California Aviation Disasters.)

The film ends with Jimmy Stewart’s character flying an airplane, made from parts of a crashed cargo plane, out of the desert and to safety. Frank Tallman was supposed to do the flying, but he had received an injury to his leg while playing with his young son’s go-kart.

That’s right. Go-kart.

So Mantz did the flying:

Joining Mantz for the flight would be Bobby Rose, the “Dean of Hollywood stuntmen,” who would stand behind Mantz in the open cockpit and double for actor Hardy Kruger….

… Mantz and Rose took off from the airport at Yuma, Arizona, for the scheduled 7:00 a.m. call and flew to the nearby filming location at Buttercup Valley. On the first pass the P-1 rose into the air too far beyond the range of the first camera, so Mantz circled around to make another attempt.

As Mantz came in on his second low pass, the P-1 gradually descended, making an unplanned touchdown on the hardened, sandy ground of the desert. This jarring impact triggered a structural failure of the aircraft’s tail boom section, snapping the P-1’s fuselage in two immediately behind the wings. The aircraft began breaking up, with the heavier nose and open cockpit section somersaulting forward while catapulting the now-detached tail section over and past the forward section. Stuntman Bobby Rose was flung from the crash and survived with a broken shoulder and pelvis, but Paul Mantz was killed instantly, crushed as the heavy nose section rolled over on itself.

The entire crash sequence was captured on film by the movie crew, providing investigators with a dramatic and vivid account of how the crash occurred. (Notable California Aviation Disasters.)

FRANK TALLMAN SMASHES INTO SANTIAGO PEAK. Amazingly, Frank Tallman’s go-kart injury became infected and his leg was amputated. But that didn't slow him down:

Undaunted, he taught himself to fly with one leg and returned to stunting. Within a year he had requalified as a pilot of aircraft ranging from helicopters to military fighter planes. He became the first amputee to hold all FAA licenses. (Notable California Aviation Disasters.)

Thirteen years later, Tallman died in yet another crash, this one in the Santa Ana Mountains, not far from where I now sit (at this moment, I'm looking at Santiago Peak, at about where Tallman crashed):

Famed stunt pilot Frank Tallman was killed two days shy of his 59th birthday when his twin-engine Piper PA-23 Aztec … crashed near the top of the 3,500-foot Bell Ridge [actually, Santiago Pk.] in the Santa Ana Mountains of rural Orange County during a rainstorm….

The nearest weather station to the crash site was reporting a 600-foot overcast and heavy rain at the time of the accident. Tallman was flying VFR (visual flight rules) in what the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) deemed were IFR (instrument flight rules) conditions.

Orange County sheriff’s deputies located the wreckage of the plane near Santiago Peak in the Cleveland National Forest at about 7:00 a.m. the following morning, April 16. An extensive search had been initiated by deputies, Orange County fire personnel, the Civil Air Patrol and a U.S. Marine Corps helicopter after several ground stations in the region had picked up an emergency radio signal around midnight.

Tallman, who was flying alone, was found dead in the cockpit, still secured by his seatbelt.

Among his legendary work was his flying for the film—Catch-22!