Helicopter Pilots Locate Wreckage, 13-Man Ground Party Recovers Bodies
Editor’s note: This article ran in the May 2, 1958, issue.
A Fort Carson ground party yesterday brought out the bodies of three airmen killed in the wreck of a B-25 bomber on a south ridge of Pikes Peak. An eight-man mountain and cold weather rescue team stationed for the winter at Camp Hale joined a group from Fort Carson at Cripple Creek Wednesday afternoon and established that the three crew members were dead.
A WEASEL from Camp Hale and ambulance from Carson completed the grim task after Army fliers from Carson sighted and identified the wreckage at 10,500 feet altitude.
The bomber was lost Tuesday on a routine flight from Pueblo to Lowry Air Force Base, Denver. It was several miles off course in a snowstorm and struck the ridge 500 feet below the crest.
Major Robert J. MacVittle, 35, pilot had reported by radio on reaching 10,000-feet altitude only nine minutes after takeoff from the Pueblo airport. The crash happened soon after he made the report.
Snow and severe icing conditions prevented an air search on Tuesday after the bomber was reported overdue. Six Carson helicopters which had been assigned to a sector from south of Pueblo to south of Colorado Springs went up into the mountains at 5 a.m., Wednesday. They were joined at 9 a.m. by seven planes.
FORTY MINUTES later 1st Lt. Don Wilderson, pilot of an L019, and his observer, 1st Lt. Conrad Chesser, reported sighting parachutes and wreckage.
Their find was identified by aircraft serial number from a Carson helicopter piloted by 1st Lt. Billy Stebbins with 1st Lt. Tom Gochnaur as observer. A ground rescue party was organized at Carson when altitude and ground conditions made landing impossible.
The group reached the crash site Wednesday evening, bivouacked nearby and brought the bodies out Thursday morning after hiking two to three miles over rugged terrain to the crash site, off the Gold Camp road 15 miles east of Cripple Creek.
At 6:30 a.m. yesterday, a 13-man ground rescue team, led by 1st Lt. Karl Holzl, commander of the winter training platoon at Camp Hale, left its camp site at Clyde and set out on foot for the scene of the crash.
AFTER TWO and one half hours of climbing through snow, ice, and heavy undergrowth, the party reached the burned out portion of the timber where the plane had plowed into the mountainside at an approximate elevation of 10,500 feet.
Parts of the wreckage, the largest of which were an engine and the nose section, were scattered over a large area. Shreds of the crew’s red and white parachutes hung limply in the trees and the timber closest to the point of impact were still smouldering.
Members of the ground party located the bodies of the dead crewmen, strapped them in Stokes’ litters and carried them back to Clyde where they were placed in an Army ambulance which would take them to Fort Carson and later to Lowry Air Force Base.
The rescue team included: Cpl. Gunnar Jansen, Sp-3 Mike Mullin, Sp-3 Bruce Hunter, Sp-3 Dick Strand, PFC Norman Sayler, PFC Bud Werner, PFC Alfred Lane and Pvt. Bill Reichelt.