Wyoming History: 23 Died In 5 Crashes In 1935, A Terrible Year For Aviation

The skies above Wyoming in 1935 were anything but friendly to fly.

In a six-month window from May through October, 23 people were killed in five airplane crashes that made national headlines. Those included a couple on a honeymoon, a recent college student, a stewardess from Kemmerer, a socialite from Pittsburgh, business executives and respected veteran pilots — among many others.

“Swift sky liners have sent 23 persons hurtling to their deaths in five airplane disasters this year,” the Casper Star-Tribune Herald reported Oct. 31, 1935.

Two crashes happened in the Glendo, Wyoming region, two in Cheyenne and one near Sheridan. And headlines that summer and fall continued to be filled with many more aircraft incidents nationally, most noteworthy the death of beloved humorist Will Rogers and his pilot, Wiley Post, in an Alaska air crash Aug. 15.

Two planes that went down in Wyoming belonged to United Air Lines, one to the Wyoming Air Service, one to a charter air service, and another was a private biplane.

May 27, 1935

Veteran Denver-based pilot Al Lucas was at the controls of a Boeing 221 Monomail aircraft and had just taken off from Casper headed to Cheyenne on May 27 when the Wyoming Air Service mail plane went into the side of a hill 21 miles south of Glendo.

Wyoming Air Service President Dick Leferink told the Casper Tribune-Herald that he believed his pilot became trapped in dense fog, though at takeoff from Casper he had received a weather report of a 600-foot ceiling all the way to Cheyenne. Lucas had been trying to follow the highway south.

The official Department of Commerce accident report on Oct. 3, 1935, stated Lucas had made contact with Cheyenne at 3:48 p.m. while he was 3 miles south of Douglas, and people on the ground noticed him following Highway 184 about 4 miles northeast of where the plane crashed.

“The plane was below the tops of the canyon walls which are not more than 250 feet above the highway,” the report said. “Fog and clouds were also below the tops of the canyon walls, and it was raining hard.”

The report stated he tried to fly over two hills to connect to the highway and misjudged the contour of the hills. He hit the ground while flying at normal speed and in a descent.

“It is the opinion of the Accident Board that the probable cause of this accident was an accidental collision with the ground while flying low due to extremely sever local storm conditions,” the report stated.

Leferink called his pilot highly skilled and someone who neither smoked nor drank.

“Nobody is to blame,” he said, as reported in the Casper paper May 28, 1935. “It was the result of a rapidly changing condition, and a most severe one at that.”

Aug. 15, 1935

Nearly three months later on Aug. 15, an Aero Mayflower Transit Co. flight carrying owner Burnside Smith, pilot Dick Arnett and his recent bride, Eleanor, flew into the side of Laramie Peak southwest of Glendo as they traveled from Helena, Montana, to Denver about 8:05 p.m.

For Smith, the trip was a business one and for the couple a honeymoon.

The crash was not found until Aug. 20.

A recovery effort involved horses and stretchers that had to be left for a foot climb further up the western slope of the peak to the wreckage and bodies. The pilot’s father, Dr. A.C. Arnett of Indianapolis, was part of the search. He also was a pilot and had taught his son to fly at age 16.

The aircraft was a Waco YKC single-engine and his father surmised that Dick Arnett had ran into a bad storm and was trying to turn back toward Casper airport, because the aircraft was off course by about 40 miles when he hit the peak, the Casper Tribune-Herald reported Aug. 21, 1935.

The official investigation concluded the crash was the result of poor judgement on the part of the pilot for trying to fly over the “a hazardous route” in fog and rain.

Sept. 27, 1935

On Sept. 27, a private red biplane carrying Lloyd C. Terry, an oilman with a company operating in four states; Margaret (Patsy) True, 19, the daughter of a Texas oil firm representative Harry True; and pilot E.E. Dildine, 33, took off from Shelby, Montana, to Denver.

Dildine had been a test pilot for the U.S. Navy and also the pilot for famous newspaperman William Randolph Hearst, the Havre Daily News reported on Sept. 28, 1935.

Terry and his pilot and offered to take True to Denver. She was a recent graduate of the University of Colorado and was going to see her uncle, Allen True, who was a prominent artist.

The plane crashed in the mountains near the OW Ranch of the late Wyoming Sen. John B. Kendrick.

The wife of a homesteader, Mrs. Lee Evans of Passaic, Wyoming, ran 4 miles to the ranch to use a phone tpo call the senator’s son to say she saw a cloud of smoke in the sky and heard a crash about 5 miles from her home, the Great Falls Tribune reported Sept. 28.

Initial efforts to reach the site were hindered by a snowstorm. When the wreckage was reached, searchers found the bodies badly burned and torn. News reports stated a wing from the plane had struck the side of the hill and the plane traveled another 2 miles before impacting the hill.

Oct. 7, 1935

At 2:19 a.m. on Oct. 7, a United Airlines Boeing 247D with a crew of three and nine passengers was approaching Cheyenne. Weather was clear and normal radio contacts had been made through the flight.

At the controls was experienced pilot, H.A. Collison, with G.E. Batty in the copilot seat and Leona Mason the stewardess.

The flight from Oakland, Salt Lake City, Cheyenne, to Denver had left Salt Lake City at 12:07 a.m. and the weather clear. Among the passengers was the socialite daughter of a Pittsburgh steel executive and a man who had another man’s ticket.

One news report had former President Herbert Hoover as someone who had planned to board the plane in Oakland.

The official Bureau of Commerce accident investigation noted that the landing gear was not down, cockpit lights were bright and not appropriate for instrument flying, and that the aircraft was operating normally at impact.

At 2:16 a.m. the copilot taking with Cheyenne and gave the aircraft’s position as “Silver Crown,” 3 miles west of where the crash occurred. When Cheyenne attempted to contact the plat at 2:19 p.m. it received no response.

The crash investigation found the plane collided with a knoll about 15 miles west of the city, tearing out the engines. It skipped airborne again for 1,120 feet and crashed. No mechanical issues were noted. Landing gear had not been extended.

“It is the opinion of the accident board that the probable cause of this accident was an error on the part of the pilot in judging his altitude or his distance from the airport or both,” investigators wrote in the official report dated Oct. 31, 1935.

A Wyoming researcher presented his extensive findings on the crash last year at the Wyoming State Museum.

Mason, the stewardess, was a native of Kemmerer, Wyoming, where she was born June 10, 1907. She joined United Airlines on May 21, 1934, and was assigned to the Cheyenne division. She was transferred to the Salt Lake City division in September 1934 and on duty there since.

The 28-year-old was buried beside the grave of her mother in Rock Springs. Her mother had died in 1918.

Collison, while serving as air mail pilot, was reportedly injured in Cheyenne nine years earlier, according to the Shelby County News Gazette in Windsor, Illinois.

“Haldon A. Collison, Windsor boy who is an air mail pilot, was injured a few days ago near Cheyenne, Wyo., when his plane fell 800 feet. He was in the hospital, but the extent of his injuries was not learned,” the paper reported Feb. 16, 1926.

Oct. 30, 1935

On Oct. 30, United Airlines would lose another Boeing 247D aircraft just outside Cheyenne when a test pilot took it for a flight after a day of repair work.

“An ugly black smudge on a white hillside where four men died in flames when a giant transport plane crashed on a test flight during a snowstorm last night was the starting point of an investigation into Cheyenne’s second air disaster in 23 days,” the Associated Press reported in a Casper Tribune-Herald story on Oct. 31, 1935.

At the controls was M. T. Arnold, 35, a test pilot for the airline; Hanley G. Cohn of Denver, a Wyoming Air Service pilot who had “gone along for the ride;” Edward Yantis, 28, a mechanic; and Harold Kaufman, 21, a mechanic and recently married.

The plane crashed just after takeoff, hitting a knoll a few miles from the airport with both gas tanks exploding on impact.

The official investigation found that Arnold, a respected and veteran pilot, had initiated a sharp turn to the right and the aircraft turned nose-down and crashed into the hillside. Repairs to the aircraft had centered around the instruments.

The aircraft was not found to be at issue, and investigators believed the windshield may have been iced to obscure vision, but it should not have prevented his ability to use side windows or instruments to navigate appropriately.

“It is the opinion of the Accident Board that the probable cause of the accident was poor judgement on the part of the pilot for executing an abrupt maneuver with insufficient altitude for safety and failure of the pilot to maintain proper control of the aircraft in this maneuver,” investigators concluded.

All four members of the flight left widows, and Cohn has two young sons in Denver. Yantis and his wife were expecting a child.

A United Air Lines mechanic named C.N. Peterson had been invited on the test flight but declined.

“I was hungry when I got through word and so I decided to go on home,” he told an Associated Press reporter on Oct. 31. He said the day before he had ridden on other test flights with Arnold the day of the crash.

On Nov. 1, 1935, the Los Angeles Times carried a story that referred to four simultaneous aircraft disaster investigations at three sites across the county — the Cheyenne Oct. 7 crash and Oct. 30 United Air Lines incidents; in Annapolis, Maryland, where a plane crashed into Chesapeake Bay on Oct. 31; and in Dayton, Ohio, where a Army Air Corps Bomber went down, killing one and injuring four.

And a columnist for the Ventura Free Press in Ventura, California, took note of the all the air crashes filling headlines across the country.

“The industry is not yet perfected,” wrote Betty Clancy on Nov. 9, 1936, on a front-page column. “There are far too many crashes for the number of flying hours. If you insist that aviation is perfect, then you must admit that man’s ability to control the airship is far from perfect.”

Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.