The story below is from our July/August 2023 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
Photo above: Courtesy of Nelson Harris
In 1959, a Piedmont Airlines flight bound for Roanoke disappeared from radar. The doomed plane was found 36 hours later.
Piedmont Airlines Flight 349 left Washington, DC, at 7:15 p.m. en route to Roanoke on October 30, 1959, with 24 passengers and three crew members. After receiving landing instructions for a brief stop at the Charlottesville airport, the plane disappeared from radar at 8:24 p.m. Unable to maintain contact with the pilot, air traffic controllers realized something had gone terribly wrong.
The search for the missing DC-3 aircraft began in the early morning hours the following day. With scarce information, searchers and airport officials had little to guide their efforts. An intensive search by state police, rescue personnel and volunteers covered a wide swath of central Virginia ranging from Greene County to Rockbridge County and areas in between. A full 24 hours after Flight 349 disappeared, nothing had been found. As reports of the missing aircraft became the lead stories in newspapers and on local television, calls began flooding into the area’s sheriff and police departments. Most promising were hunters, who claimed to have seen a fireball or heard an explosion near the Blue Ridge Parkway. Helicopters and small planes widened their search areas, including flying over sections of the parkway, but with no success. The Charlottesville airport served as the command center to coordinate what had grown into a seven-county search area.
Finally at 8 a.m. on November 1, almost 36 hours after Flight 349’s last contact, an Air Force helicopter spotted the wreckage on the slope of Bucks Elbow Mountain, 18 miles west of Charlottesville in Albemarle County. Rescuers accessed the site via a muddy logging road and then the last half-mile on foot. What they found was both tragic and miraculous. The plane’s front end had ripped open on impact, exposing the interior of the passenger section from the midsection back to the tail. Both wings had sheared off, and wreckage was scattered over 60 yards. Bodies were found near the front of the fuselage, having been thrown through the plane and onto the slope upon impact. Most were still in their seats.
Miraculously, rescuers found one passenger still alive, Phil Bradley of Clifton Forge. The 33-year-old was taken to UVA Hospital with a dislocated hip, abrasions and suffering from exposure. When first reached by Air Force Sgt. John Weis, Bradley told him, “I’m all right. Go on up and see if anyone else is alive.”
No one else was.
Among the dead were two from Roanoke – David Findlay and William Peake. Findlay, 39, was a sales manager for WDBJ and returning from a business trip. Responding to an appeal for volunteers, five from WDBJ went to the crash site to search for their friend. Chuck McKeever, Frank Koehler, Blake Brown, Ray Terrill, and Don Costa retrieved Findlay’s body and carried it down the mountain. Findlay was survived by his wife and four daughters. Peake, 33, was a salesman for Gillette Safety Razor and was survived by a wife and three children.
Walter Vaughan of Calumet City, Illinois, was also on Flight 349 for a promised visit with his brother Sidney, Roanoke’s assistant fire chief.
Four other Roanokers had planned to board the plane in Washington but missed the flight. Frank Morris, Jr., the merchandise promotion manager for Smartwear-Irving Saks, had flown into Washington from New York, with a ticket for Flight 349. Arriving a half-hour late, Morris missed the connection and took a later flight. “It was the most important half-hour of my life,” he would later tell reporters. Milton Hillier was on stand-by but was passed over and took a train to Roanoke the next day. Herbert Keyser, an engineer, was dissuaded from taking Flight 349 by a co-worker who asked Keyser to ride back to Roanoke with him in his car. And Richard Hodges had also been in New York but was able to transfer his ticket from Flight 349 to an earlier one into Roanoke, having gotten the last available seat.
A Civil Aeronautics Board investigation concluded that the crash of Flight 349 was due to a faulty automatic direction finder. A three-day hearing had concluded the lengthy investigation that also revealed the pilots had failed to do a small, required course change. A malfunctioning ADF and human error doomed the plane when it struck the 2,500-foot mountain approximately 500 feet below its summit. According to the lone survivor, all seemed normal prior to the crash. Bradley related to investigators that he was reading as were many other passengers when he cut his overhead light off for a quick nap. He then heard the wings hitting trees and went unconscious. The next thing he remembered was looking up into the night sky, still in his seat.
For Piedmont Airlines, founded in 1940 in Winston-Salem, Flight 349 was the first fatal crash in the company’s history. Today, rusted remnants of Flight 349’s fuselage remain on Bucks Elbow Mountain, near Afton Mountain. As for the flight’s lone survivor Phil Bradley, he recovered from his injuries such that he was home by Christmas that year. In 1999, Bradley designed and had placed a memorial to the flight’s victims in Mint Springs Valley Park in Crozet near the base of Bucks Elbow. He died in 2013 in a hospice in Monroe, NC, at age 87. In a 2009 interview, Bradley said he saw an apparition of Christ seconds before the crash and that his seat had been at the very back of the plane. “What if I had had to take another seat? I ponder this every day, and I have no answer.”
The story above is from our July/August 2023 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
