By Colleen Nelson
This month’s old photos are a tribute to those who served our country bravely and sometimes against all odds. Happy Memorial Day!
Imagine a roomful of kids running to the windows of the one-room schoolhouse in Spraggs, staring open mouthed into the wet, gray sky. Two Thunder Jets are roaring and circling low overhead. It’s 1 pm and the weather today – March 16, 1950 – is cold and soupy. Those kids don’t know it – yet – that Army Air Force pilots Donald Lynch and John Ostler, both 23 years old, are lost, almost out of gas and this straight stretch of State Route 218 is the closest thing to a runway they’ve seen for miles.
These fighter pilots have a few short minutes to figure out how to save their own lives and hopefully the lives of anyone who might be on the ground when they come in. What will happen to their F-18 war birds is anyone’s guess.
History tells us that “USAF jets crashed almost weekly. Jets in 1950 were not very reliable.”
Lynch and Ostler had left Otis Air Force Base in Falmouth, Massachusetts that morning to fly these decommissioned planes to an Air National Guard unit in Wichita, Kansas. Wingman Ostler lost his radio compass after passing New York at 7000 feet, doing 400 mph through thickening flurries. By the time the two jets got to Altoona, a pressure warning light was on in Lynch’s cockpit. Fearing the fuel booster might go out, he switched to wing auxiliary, bypassing the main fuel tank. Visibility was worsening so he wobbled his wings, brought Ostler into tight formation and headed for Pittsburgh to refuel. But calls to Pittsburgh went unanswered and Ostler’s radio was not receiving. Using hand signals to communicate, the pilots began circling, looking for landmarks and finally, as fuel reserves were spent, a place to land. That straight stretch of 218 was all that they could find.
As Ostler circled Spraggs, Lynch dropped his speed to 140 MPH and touched down on the macadam heading south. At that moment a car came up from Blacksville and Lynch did “the only thing left. I pulled back on the stick and left the road. Eyewitnesses said I cleared the car by about two feet. With the nose pulled up as far as I dared I lost sight of the road and when I came down I clipped off six telephone poles, hit back on the road, ran about 1000 feet and hit a culvert that threw me off the road.” The plane kept rolling for another 300 feet before coming to a stop against a sycamore tree.
Lynch would later tell reporters “he placed his head between his legs and hoped for the best.”
Ostler watched Lynch pick himself out of the wreckage and watched the crowd swarming the scene, making another road landing impossible.
He scanned the hills for a field big enough to absorb his landing and decided the field on Carl Hoy’s farm would have to do.
In his official testimony later he reports, “I tightened the safety belt and harness and set up a pattern, lost airspeed down to 200 MPH, opened my canopy, checked air gear up, lowered full flaps and when I saw the field was made I pulled the throttle past the stop cock and went in.”
The wreckage from his landing was scattered for a mile from the point of impact, the cockpit was sheered in two, and ammunition boxes, hoses and an empty parachute littered the empty seat.
The memory of that landing lasted a lifetime for Hoy’s son Carl. Sixty years later in 2010, he told this reporter, “He cut through a patch of willows like they were straws and knocked over a pile of lumber I had stacked, took out some fence and went between a barn and a walnut tree without hitting either one. It was amazing. Wreckage was everywhere. I heard he got out in one piece and walked to the first house he could see – Harold Yeager’s.”
Ostler would be treated at Waynesburg Hospital for a dislocated thumb and body abrasions. He was back on active duty on Monday.
As for those big birds that thrilled a busload of kids on their way home from school, smoldering by the highway and littering Hoy’s pasture, they were government property waiting to be reclaimed. But not until the neighborhood had totally trashed out every muddy road driving in from every direction to get a good look at what had just come down from the sky.
By Tuesday, Lynch’s plane was taken to Greater Pittsburgh Airport, but the scattered remains of Ostler’s jet were guarded by National Guardsmen for the days it took for the government to pick up the pieces.
Not all pieces made it out of Spraggs. Shiny bits of it came up with the plow for years. Speculation about top-secret missions and missing caches became part of local lore. Rumor has it someone who was early on the scene maybe even grabbed a gun. It’s true that government investigators asked a lot of hard questions in that regard. Rumor also has it that the weapon in question was found “a number of years later” on Brant Hill, by a road crew, fixing a slip.
These photographs taken by Richard Morgan for the Observer-Reporter that day still put a crisp edge on the event that would keep people talking for years to come.
But for those kids at the one room school in Spraggs, it was a moment when book learning time stood still and the electrifying moment of history as it’s happening happened right before their eyes.
