A Glint in the Sun

What an old wreck can tell us

It’s a sparkling June morning in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire. At a parking area halfway up Belknap Mountain in Gilford, a small group of hikers assembles amid the squawking of blue jays and oven birds. The group, nearly all of us strangers, adjusts our gear as we await our guide for the morning, Stephen Brown, a safety specialist with the Federal Aviation Administration.

            It’s about an hour hike to the summit, which overlooks scenic Lake Winnipesauke and the surrounding White Mountains. But it’s not the view that we’re here to see. Forty-six years ago, on June 18, 1972, two young men flying in a Piper Arrow took off from Laconia Municipal Airport, turned southbound toward Massachusetts and slammed into the side of the mountain, killing both. The plan is to hike to the wreckage, learn the details of the crash and contemplate the implications of that tragic day.

            Brown is a fit, fortyish man with a brush-cut haircut and a broad smile. He advises us to apply plenty of bug spray lest the mosquitoes and black flies make a meal out of us.

            Leading the way, Brown keeps up a steady patter as he points out things and warns us to avoid tripping over exposed tree roots or slippery rocks. He works out of an office near Boston, but is a long-time resident of Laconia, and says he’s hiked these woods many times. He says he’s long known of the accident and even visited the crash site, but until recently always had the story wrong. For some reason, he always thought it involved a husband and wife departing after a weekend visit in the fall; that they took off into the clouds and either failed to follow the correct departure procedure or encountered icing in clouds and flew into the mountainside.

            One day, while waiting to get his car repaired in town, Brown ducked into the local library and began doing some research. Reading old newspapers, he learned that the flight actually involved two young men, that it occurred in early summer, and that the flight was conducted under visual flight rules. Not only that, but the wreckage wouldn’t be found for nearly a year. Almost as intriguing, Brown said, was realizing how different flying was back then—long before GPS came into use, at a time when radar coverage and air traffic control assistance was less available, when weather forecasting was not nearly as accurate or long-ranging as today, and before aircraft were required to carry emergency locator beacons.

             The more he learned, the more Brown became convinced that the story of the accident and the hike to the crash site would make for a unique safety seminar.

            A fire tower marks the mountain’s 2,382-foot summit. Brown tells us to take a break while we wait for a handful of stragglers to catch up. For those not afraid of heights, he encourages climbing the tower’s narrow stairs in order to take in the view.

The flight that June ’72 day began 120 miles to the southwest, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Richard Ruthel, 26, was a flight instructor who aspired to be airline pilot like his father. He had more than 2300 hours of experience, a number that by today’s standards would easily qualify him for work at a major airline, but because of a surplus of ex-military pilots for hire at the time, jobs at airlines were few and far between (Ruthel would be 72 and retired today).

            His student that day was Carl Juhaze, 20, of nearby Copake, NY. Juhaze had about 20 hours of experience, but was considered an “atypical” student. He wasn’t receiving formal training and didn’t seem to care about getting his license. He just liked to fly and would occasionally show up at the airport on weekends to rent a plane and go up with an instructor.

            The plane was a year-old, four-place Piper Arrow, N5291T.

            The weather forecast was for cloudy skies, with the overcast lowering throughout the day. Hurricane Agnes was churning up the Eastern Seaboard, and showers were forecast for overnight, with heavy rain and winds the next day.

           The plan was to fly to Laconia and back—about an hour each way. Witnesses in Laconia reported the two did not stick around long, just enough for a bathroom break and gulp of water. The two may have felt pressure to hurry because the plane was blocked out for just two and one-half hours. But another factor may have been the weather. Laconia was reporting a 1,500 foot broken ceiling, visibility five miles in haze, and winds out of the southeast at 6 knots.

            Belknap Mountain stands just three miles to the south of Laconia airport. Because of this, the procedure for eastbound departures out of Laconia is to climb to 2,500 feet before making any turns. After takeoff, 91T made an immediate turn to the south.

           

“I want you to keep in mind that this was a place of tragedy,” Brown says to the assembled group before leading us down to the crash site.  “Two young men died here. They left behind grieving parents, siblings and friends.” In addition, there’s the impact on the dozens of people who searched for the wreckage and the people who ultimately recovered the bodies, the impact on the flight school that rented the plane and the community of pilots at the airport, and the impact on the investigators themselves. It’s hard not to be affected, Brown says, and every investigator can cite a particular case that still tears at them.

            The last 125 yards off trail to the crash site is a steep scramble over rocks and dense underbrush. It’s single file. If you don’t know exactly where to look the wreckage would be easy to miss.

            “There’s not all that much left,” admits Brown, standing in front of crumpled mass of aluminum that was once a wing. Nearby is the engine block and a section of what was the horizontal stabilizer. When the plane was discovered, Brown says, the tail section was wrapped around a tree. Most of the fuselage was destroyed in the fire, and the only recognizable part of the cockpit left is the rudder pedals. Over time, Brown says, the wreckage has slid several yards down the side of the mountain from it’s original impact point.

            If, as Brown suspects, the plane was in the clouds when it hit the mountain, the end would have been mercifully swift. “They barely had time to suck in a final breath when they realized what was about to happen to them,” he says.

            Investigations are multifaceted, Brown says.  It begins with the wreckage. In this case, they would have looked at damage to the trees and other impact marks to determine direction and speed. They’d examine the propeller and engine to see if the engine was developing power, and if so how much. They’d look for “slap” marks on cockpit instruments, created when the needles on cockpit instruments slap against the dial on impact, showing exactly what they indicated at the time of the crash.

            But there’s also a lot of background research. They interview witnesses, look at the plane’s maintenance records, examine the training and background of the pilots, their medical history, their life situation and possible extenuating circumstances. It’s one reason why full accident reports take a year or more to complete.

            In this case, the investigation was even more difficult because the wreckage wasn’t found for nearly a year.

            

Once people realized the plane was missing, officials struggled to determine where to begin looking. There was no distress call, no flight plan, nothing beyond the basic route of flight between Great Barrington and Laconia, a route that covered a lot of forest land and hilly terrain. Search efforts concentrated on the region around Mount Monadnock near Keene, NH, the largest mountain along the route of flight.

            On June 25, searchers believed they found something near Campton, NH, near Lake Winnipesauke. It turned out to be a Cessna 182 piloted by Melvin Seymour that went missing six years before. Seymour was flying to Portland, Maine, from Preston, Iowa, when he disappeared on March 19, 1966.

            In the absence of a resolution, rumors began to circulate. Juhaze, it was learned, had spent time in a mental hospital and had been involved in the theft of an aircraft in New York. Speculation started that perhaps he hijacked the plane, that maybe he forced Ruthel to fly him to Canada. Maybe it was some sort of murder-suicide, or maybe they did it together.

            With no evidence of a crash and no clue where else to look, the search was officially called off on June 29, 1972. News coverage of the missing plane and the mystery surrounding it quickly disappeared, eclipsed by the July 4 holiday, the 1972 presidential campaign and the growing Watergate scandal in Washington.

            Nearly a year later, two young Laconia men, Alan Dauphin and Lloyd Decato, noticed something glinting in the sun off the side of Mount Belknap. Curious, they decided to investigate. Not far from the summit, they saw the tail of the plane stuck in a tree, flapping in the wind. While one of the young men stood by the wreckage, the other climbed to the forest tower on the summit for help.

            The week before Decato’s younger brother had made the same climb. And though he never reached the wreckage, his dog returned with an odd-looking bone. Their father told them it was the bone of an animal. Authorities determined it was the knee bone of one of the victims.

            In its final report, the National Transportation Safety Board determined that Ruthel had climbed into the clouds, leveled off and then flew straight into the mountain. It concluded that he probably misjudged his altitude. How did this happen? The NTSB doesn’t say. A look at the plane’s altimeter should have told Ruthel exactly how high they were.

            My own theory: With Hurricane Agnes approaching the barometer was likely rapidly falling. Aircraft altimeters have to be adjusted to the barometric pressure in order to read correctly, and an altimeter uncorrected to a falling barometer will read higher than the actual altitude. Having planned for a strictly visual flight that day, it’s possible the two men failed to reset their altimeter before leaving Great Barrington, and then again before departing Laconia. After taking off and turning to the south, a decision was made to climb into the clouds.

            That, however, is my own speculation. Airplane crashes—even the most obvious ones—are always a bit of a mystery. How does someone with all that training and experience make such a stupendous blunder? It’s difficult to understand.  Investigators, with all their collective experience and expertise, can never get inside the head of a pilot. Was it stress? Hubris? Complacency? Maybe a bit of all three. Such is the nature of human psychology.

            Having flown long enough and read enough accident reports, however, I know that no pilot is immune from making bad decisions. Scott Crossfield, a legendary test pilot, the first man to fly twice the speed of sound and who helped design and fly the X-15 rocket plane, took off in his Cessna 210 from an airfield in Prattville, Alabama, in 2006 and flew straight into a line of thunderstorms, never to be seen again.  Any pilot reading this who says “That could never happen to me” is either a fool or a liar.