A small plane crashed into a car dealership parking lot near the border of Ohio and West Virginia early Tuesday, killing two people on board and sparking a large fire.
A small plane crashed into a car dealership parking lot near the border of Ohio and West Virginia early Tuesday, killing two people on board and sparking a large fire.
The crash of the 1974 Beechcraft Air King E90 in Marietta, Ohio, was reported about 7:15 a.m., according to the Ohio State Highway Patrol. The pilot and another person on board were killed. The crash damaged several vehicles at the dealership and sparked a fire that sent dark plumes of smoke spewing into the air, but no one on the ground was injured. It wasn’t known if anyone was in the dealership at the time of the crash.
The plane had apparently departed about 30 minutes earlier from John Glenn International Airport in Ohio, but it was not immediately clear where it was headed. The two victims were the only people in the plane, authorities said, and their names have not been released.
The cause of the crash has not yet been determined. The crash will be investigated by the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board.
Marietta is along the Ohio River on the border between Ohio and West Virginia.
A small plane carrying three people crashed in northern West Virginia Thursday.
A small plane carrying three people crashed in northern West Virginia Thursday.
The single engine Piper PA-32 aircraft took off from Shawnee Field Airport in Bloomfield, Indiana and was headed to Deck Airport in Myerstown, Pennsylvania.
Officials with the Federal Aviation Administration said the plane lost altitude before it crashed in a wooded area near Metz, in Marion County, about 90 miles south of Pittsburgh.
The aircraft was owned by Skyhawk Associates of Myerstown, Pennsylvania.
According to the Marion County Sheriff’s Department, the Mannington Volunteer Fire Department received a report around 7 p.m. of an aircraft down.
First responders located parts of wreckage in the Campbells Run area.
Three people, including the pilot and two passengers were killed. The names of the victims have not yet been released.
The FAA and National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) were expected to travel to the crash site Friday afternoon to begin their investigation.
A helicopter crash last month that killed six people in West Virginia occurred when the aircraft hit a rock face 15 minutes after takeoff from a local airport, federal investigators said in a preliminary report Tuesday.
A helicopter crash last month that killed six people in West Virginia occurred when the aircraft hit a rock face 15 minutes after takeoff from a local airport, federal investigators said in a preliminary report Tuesday.
The Vietnam-era Bell UH-1B “Huey” helicopter struck the rock face in an area about 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) from Logan County Airport in Amherstdale, National Transportation Safety Board investigators said in the report. The cockpit and cabin then crashed into a roadway and a guardrail and were consumed by fire.
Investigators have not yet released any information about the cause of the accident. A final report could take a year or two to complete, they said.
The flight on June 22 was the last scheduled for the day during a multiday reunion for helicopter enthusiasts where visitors could sign up to ride or fly the historic Huey helicopter, described by organizers as one of the last of its kind still flying.
The helicopter was flown by the 114th Assault Helicopter Company, “The Knights of the Sky,” in Vinh Long, Vietnam, throughout much of the 1960s, according to the website for MARPAT Aviation, a Logan County flight school that operated the helicopter. After the Huey returned to the U.S. in 1971, the website says, it was featured in movies such as “Die Hard, “The Rock” and “Under Siege: Dark Territory.”
During the reunion, people who made a donation could fly the helicopter with a “safety pilot” seated in the left front seat, according to the report. People could take a ride on the helicopter for a suggested donation.
A private pilot, two “pilot rated” passengers and three others were killed in the crash.
Investigators said wreckage from the crash was found 26 feet (8 meters) across a roadway, as well as in a ditch at the base of a rock face. Additional wreckage including pieces of Plexiglas, a section of a tail rotor blade were found about 40 feet (12 meters) above the wreckage on a ledge of the steep rock face.
There were no known witnesses to the accident, according to the report.
The site of the pot plane crash, just down the hill from what is now Yeager Airport in Charleston, West Virginia.
On June 6, 1979, a plane crashed on the side of the mountain at what was then known as the Kanawha Airport in Charleston. The aging DC – 6 was carrying 26,000 pounds of marijuana. The entire episode has since been referred to as the Pot Plane Crash.
Jerome Lill was on board the plane when it went down. He recently wrote the book, “Final Approach: In the Battle of Angels, it’s a God Thing,” about his life and smuggling days, and later, hitting rock bottom and where he is now.
He visited Charleston for the anniversary of the crash and sat down with Eric Douglas in our studios.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Douglas: Set the stage, six months before you got here. How did all this come to be?
Lill: I wasn’t a cocaine dealer or anything. I wanted to strictly stick with marijuana. I had decided I wanted to be a Colombian marijuana smuggler.
Douglas: Why Charleston, West Virginia? Why were you coming here?
Lill: I wanted to be with my big load of Colombian marijuana. Okay, it was an ego trip for myself, but not even to show other people. I wanted to do this thing. And I just wanted to be with my pot. So they picked Charleston. We didn’t know why they picked Charleston. So we just said okay, Charleston. Now one thing we didn’t do, we never came and looked at Charleston. We should have planned that because when I crashed that plane and I was in the woods, I ran for seven hours. I was running around the Charleston airport in the night with my head split open, my teeth busted. And we kept going around the airport in circles. I don’t know where I was.
Douglas: Where did you cross the coast? You crossed Cuba, did you come up over Florida?
Lill: We didn’t come over Florida. We stayed back out in the ocean. We went out into the Atlantic along the coast then started coming in across North Carolina and Virginia. And David (Seesing) tells (Breck Dana) Anderson we’re coming up on a little rain cell. So David says he’s gonna fly through it, and he tells him to drop the (landing) gear, because we’re gonna wash the mud off so the DEA and the government could not trace it to Columbia. Now, I thought that was kind of stupid at the time. So who cares? We know we came from Columbia. We get busted. We’re busted.
David said Anderson also hit the hydraulic switch and dropped the hydraulics. There’s been all these stories that there was a Colombian crew on it. That we overshot the runway, that the runway wasn’t long enough. All these different stories. The fact is, Anderson, the copilot, dropped the hydraulics. He dumped the hydraulic fluid. So when you don’t have hydraulics, you can’t control the plane properly. He tries to muscle it and keep it straight. We started to list off to the right of that runway at Charleston. And I thought we were going to flip over sideways to tell you the truth. But somehow David fought it. We kept going straight, but we were going pretty quick. And he did a reverse thrust. And then he thought he was going to try to climb again. Panic. And all of a sudden you’re at the end of the runway.
Douglas: This is in the middle of the night.
Lill: Yes, it’s one o’clock in the morning. Okay, bam, flipping over. Smash. I got hit in the head. This is to set the record straight. I’m telling you exactly what went down here. It sounds kind of smart. And it also sounds kind of rinky-dink. We didn’t do a very good job.
Douglas: In your book “Final Approach: In the Battle of Angels, it’s a God Thing” you talk about your own redemption.
Lill: This book is about getting my stuff together to write this. I made a deal with God after I did get sober that I would make him the star in my book and that’s why it says “it’s a God thing.” This is not about glorifying drug smuggling. This is not about that. This is about the fact that I am able to be alive right now and get off of alcohol and drugs. And I wanted to write a book about what happened to me, how I got it together. I wanted to make my book worth something of value.
Douglas: What’s the lesson you want readers to learn? Or what do you want them to take away from it?
Lill: Since I got sober, life’s a lot more fun, because look where I am. I’m sitting here talking about a book I wrote. I could have never written a book in the condition I was in. You can go out and do good things for people. You can be a nice person, and you can find out that there’s a lot of fun in that. I’ve been a criminal. Anybody who ever hears this, who’s a criminal or you have been in prison, you can come out of that. It’s never too late. That’s what I want to do with this.
Douglas: Tell me what you’re doing with yourself now.
Lill: I’m doing children’s books. I’m doing a book about “Roadie the Rabbit.” It’s about a rabbit that I found on the side of the road on a Sunday. I’m doing a book about my cat, “Ernest Goes to the Keys.” These are all true stories about animals I owned. I’m gonna have a whole line of them.
For more on the 1979 pot plane crash, visit this story, excerpted from Inside Appalachia.
This story is part of aseries of interviews with authors from, or writing about, Appalachia.
After a plane crash killed most of Marshall University’s football team in 1970, school administrators could have resorted to the simplest choice — dropping the losing sport altogether.
They didn’t. They couldn’t bring themselves to do it.
From the 75 lives lost in the worst sports disaster in U.S. history, the program slowly rebuilt and eventually triumphed. A half-century later, those who lived through the tragedy — some by happenstance, others by fateful decisions that seemed mundane at the time — marvel as they recall the feeling that they had to keep playing.
“We felt the guys would want us to go on,” said Ed Carter, a sophomore offensive lineman who was supposed to be on the team plane but wasn’t. “We just felt we needed to continue the program.”
The team’s long, determined crawl back to success was chronicled in the 2006 movie “We Are Marshall ” — a title borrowed from the chants that resonate at Thundering Herd games. Today the team is undefeated and ranked No. 16 heading into Saturday’s home game with Middle Tennessee.
“It has been real special to see how that program has been turned around.” Carter said.
Henry Griffin/AP
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AP
FILE – In this Nov. 15, 1970, file photo, a fireman looks over the wreckage of a plane in Kenova near Huntington, W.Va. Marshall will mark the 50th anniversary of the plane crash that killed all 75 aboard on Saturday, Nov. 14, 2020, on the campus in Huntington.
In the first season after the crash, Marshall won just two games. The first winning season didn’t come for another 13 years. Then success occurred in streaks.
Marshall captured Division I-AA national championships in 1992 and 1996 and amassed the most wins of any team in the nation in the 1990s, many of them during a step up into Division I-A under coach Bob Pruett. An athlete named Randy Moss started a journey there that would redefine what was possible in terms of speed, power and size at the wide receiver position.
The success continues now in the Bowl Subdivision under coach Doc Holliday, who is 6-1 in bowl games and won a Conference USA championship in 2014.
The plane crash redefined comebacks and helped shape the identity of the public university that serves 13,000 students in Huntington.
“It’s who we are,” said athletic director Mike Hamrick, who played linebacker from 1976 to 1979. “There’s not been a comeback story like Marshall football.”
Marshall’s chartered DC-9 was returning from a game at East Carolina on Nov. 14, 1970, when it slammed into a hillside in rain and fog just short of the Huntington airport runway. The jet burst into flames, leaving a charred swath of trees. Investigators concluded that the plane was flying too low, either because of faulty altitude equipment or the pilots’ failure to read their instruments properly.
Everyone on board perished: 36 football players, 39 coaches, school administrators, community leaders, boosters and the flight crew.
John Raby/AP
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A memorial plaque is displayed at the site of a 1970 plane crash that killed 75 people, including 36 Marshall football players Oct. 24, 2020, near Huntington, W.Va. The Nov. 14, 1970 crash remains the worst sports disaster in U.S. history.
It happened a month after a plane carrying the Wichita State football team crashed in Colorado, killing 31 people, including 14 players. The Shockers football program was discontinued in 1986.
Those not on the Marshall plane have spent the last five decades dealing with heartache, self-doubt and unanswerable questions about why they were spared.
Three players — linebacker Dennis Foley and linemen Carter and Pete Naputano — were among the living but were mistakenly listed with the victims in newspaper obituaries and hometown tributes.
Foley, who was sitting out the 1970 season after hurting an ankle playing summer basketball, was one of several injured players who stayed in Huntington.
After a failed attempt to reach the crash site, he returned to campus. His roommate, kicker Marcelo Lajterman, was among the dead. That night, Foley was introduced to another student who would become his wife.
Carter had visited Texas for his father’s funeral. His mother asked him to stay a few days, and Carter obliged, missing the East Carolina trip. And yet his name remained on the passenger list. A friend who saw Carter back on campus panicked and ran screaming. He ran after her to prove he wasn’t a ghost.
A few other injured players were told at the last minute that school boosters would take their place on the plane. Cornerback and co-captain Nate Ruffin, who died of leukemia in 2001, never learned who took his seat.
“To this date, we didn’t know — nor did we care to find out — who got added to the trip,” Ruffin told The Associated Press in a 2000 interview.
Instead, the players who were left behind were called upon to identify crash victims through clothing, jewelry, shoes — even scars. Ruffin became an impromptu team spokesman, answering frantic queries from players’ parents.
There were too many funerals to attend. Six players whose bodies were never identified were buried at a nearby cemetery.
A pall of grief and skepticism hung over a program, which had a perennial losing record in the 1960s and had been placed on NCAA probation for recruiting violations in 1969. But acting university President Donald Dedmon and others quickly decided to keep football going.
Jack Lengyel, the coach hired in 1971 to usher Marshall into a new era, said the decision was “based on faith.”
They started from scratch. A ragtag group that included three dozen walk-ons, former servicemen, a soccer player, basketball players and transfer students joined the few returning athletes who were not on the plane. Some returning freshmen who were not allowed to play the previous fall due to NCAA restrictions helped fill out the team.
Ten months after the crash, in the second game of the following season, in what is still considered the biggest victory in program history, Marshall defeated Xavier, 15-13, at home by scoring a touchdown on the final play. Freshman fullback Terry Gardner caught a screen pass from Reggie Oliver and went 13 yards for the score.
Fans stormed the field in celebration.
Lengyel, now 86, gives talks to residents of the Maryland senior facility where he lives after showings of the film in which he is portrayed by Matthew McConaughey.
“The Marshall people are like a fist,” Lengyel said. “They support their athletic programs, and they always did. In the time of tragedy, they came together like a fist. They believed in the program and brought it from the ashes to the glory.”
JEFF GENTNER/AP
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FILE – In this Nov. 19, 2005, file photo, Nov. 19, 2005, a of the Memorial Fountain at Marshall University’s student center adorns quarterback Jimmy Skinner’s helmet in Huntington, W.Va. The fountain is dedicated to the memory of 75 people killed in a Nov. 14, 1970, plane crash. Among the victims were 36 Marshall football players.
A memorial fountain on Marshall’s campus is shaped like a tulip. Each rod represents one of the 75 crash victims. At a solemn ceremony every Nov. 14, the fountain is turned off. It’s turned back on every spring.
According to the university, sculptor Harry Bertoia said it was his wish that the fountain would “commemorate the living — rather than death — on the waters of life, rising, receding, surging so as to express upward growth, immortality and eternality.”
Like Foley, who met his wife amid the tragedy, Carter found purpose over the next five decades. Not religious at the time of the crash, he became a Christian. He’s preached the gospel for decades and started a ministry with his family in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
“A lot of people wondered why that (crash) happened to this day,” Carter said. “I don’t know. Why did the Lord leave me? I know that now.”
On April 8, 1951, a C-47 transport plane crashed near Charleston’s Kanawha Airport, which is now Yeager Airport, killing 21 members of the Air National Guard. They were on their way to Charleston for the funeral of fellow Guardsmen Major Woodford Sutherland. Sutherland had been killed in a freak training accident in Florida in which his parked P-51D Mustang was hit by another plane.
At the time of the tragedy, the West Virginia Air National Guard was only four years old. It was organized in the aftermath of World War II by Lieutenant Colonel James K. McLaughlin as the 167th Fighter Squadron, stationed out of Charleston. During the war, McLaughlin had led the largest Allied daytime bombing raid over Germany.
The 167th’s first planes were P-47D Thunderbolt fighters, which were soon replaced with the famous P-51D Mustangs. In 1955, the 167th was relocated to Martinsburg after part of the squadron had been separated out to form the 130th Troop Carrier Squadron, which remained in Charleston.
To this day, West Virginia Air National Guardsmen wear a patch with 21 stars in memory of the 1951 crash victims.
