When His Pilot Died Mid-Flight, Wyoming Attorney General Had To Take The Controls

Wyoming Attorney General James “Jim” Barrett carried a briefcase and overnight bag as he climbed into the state-owned Cessna 206 on Thursday, Dec. 4, 1969, at Cheyenne Regional Airport for a routine flight to Riverton.

Appointed to the job by his longtime friend Gov. Stanley Hathaway in early 1967, Barrett had been asked to address the annual gathering of the Wyoming Association of Soil and Water Conservation Districts in Riverton that evening.

He also needed to be in Casper for a Natrona County District Court case at 1:30 p.m. the following day.

Barrett’s request to use a state plane had been approved.

Wyoming Aeronautics Commission pilot George Kealey was a familiar face. He had flown Barrett on another occasion, and once Kealey checked the plane over, they loaded up and took off.

“I put the briefcase on my lap,” Barrett told state historian Mark Junge on July 8, 2010, as he recorded an oral history for the event that was about to unfold. “But he wanted to talk.”

Kealey would not talk for long. And that day would become chiseled into Barrett’s memory for the rest of his life.

“State Pilot Dies In Air,” proclaimed the headline in Cheyenne's Wyoming Eagle at the top of the front page on Dec. 5, 1969. “Barrett Hurt In Crash.”

The headline could have been much different. The only reason it wasn't was reflected in a second headline, this one in the Casper Star-Tribune on Dec. 6.

“Barrett’s Wife Says: It’s A Miracle That He’s Here,” the newspaper reported on the front page.

How the miracle unfolded began Dec. 4 with the plane climbing to cruising altitude and then doing 200 knots (230 mph) as the nose pointed northwest toward Riverton over the Laramie area. Pilot and passenger chatted about family and made other small talk until they approached the high mountain terrain.

Above Bairoil, Barrett recalled looking out at snowcapped mountains to the north.

All of a sudden, the plane lurched upward and Barrett saw his pilot looking out the window toward the left wing.

The plane lurched again.

‘Are You OK?’

“So, I called out, ‘George, are you OK?’” Barrett recalled. “No response. I called out a couple of other times, no response. So, I reached over, and I took his shoulders to turn his head around and his face was as white as a sheet, perspiration was on him, his eyes were glazy.”

Attempts to wipe the pilot’s face with a handkerchief, then a massage of his chest, proved fruitless.

The pilot’s left hand was still on the yoke of the aircraft, and his right arm and hand fell limp at his side. Barrett thought Kealey was experiencing a heart attack.

Instead, he would learn later that a cerebral hemorrhage was in the process of draining Kealey’s life away.

In an article for The Denver Post’s Sunday Empire Magazine on Dec. 5, 1976, Barrett wrote that he believed the pilot tried to speak but could not.

As he looked out the cockpit window, Barrett could see mountains ahead and, while the plane was higher than those peaks at the moment, Barrett quickly understood that he needed to make a decision.

“I knew so little about that airplane, I think I probably was just petrified right then. I couldn’t believe what was happening,” he told Junge. “I picked up the radio, and I called out and said, ‘This is Jim Barrett and George Kealey has had a heart attack, and he can’t fly the airplane, I don’t know how to fly it. Will somebody help me?’”

So began an ordeal that he and his family believed was nothing less than a miracle for a man who had stormed Omaha Beach in June 1944 and had found himself behind enemy German lines during the Battle of Bulge as a U.S. Army corporal at the end of 1944 and early 1945.

Not Mechanically Inclined

Son Richard Barrett, 72, a retired Cheyenne attorney, said his dad was someone who probably didn’t know the difference between a Phillips-head and common screwdriver.

And Jim Barrett himself wrote in the Post article that as an attorney in Lusk, Wyoming, he had flown on charter flights with local pilot Less Huff who had encouraged him to take flying lessons.

“But I always told him I had no desire to be a pilot. I wasn’t mechanically inclined,” Barrett wrote.

As the magnitude of events weighed on him that fateful Thursday, Barrett made some decisions that involved his lawyerly logic and his powers of observation from past flights.

He told Junge in his interview that he thought about going to Casper where there was a long runway, but knew he would have to fly over mountainous terrain.

He also looked at the instrument panel, said he knew how to use the “wheel” and understood where the throttle was but was worried about the control for the “gas and oil” mixture as well as the “big red cylinder with a P” that did something with the propeller.

He decided he was not going to mess with those controls. He also recalled not knowing what part of the foot pedals represented the brake and the rudders, so he would not touch those either.

After turning the yoke on his side of the airplane enough to break Kealey’s grip free on the pilot side, he tried to get a feel for the plane before deciding to try and go south to Rawlins.

He studied the instrument panel and saw they were flying at 200 knots. He had looked around the cockpit to see if there was any material that would help with flying the machine. 

He found none. Kealy was still sitting fairly steady in his seat.

“I then said prayers for both of us,” Barrett wrote in the Denver Post article. “I was certain this was going to be our last day alive.”

Once headed south, he found the Sinclair refinery and Interstate 80 and followed it to Rawlins, where he located the airfield.

Listening In

Meanwhile in Casper, 15-year-old Donnie Cooksey was with his father, John, who owned a flight school. They saw a crowd gathered around the FAA flight service facility at the Casper/Natrona County International Airport and went over to investigate.

“We could hear him talking on the radio," Cooksey said. "When he got up high enough that the radio in the airplane could be heard in Casper, we could hear him talking. And he was zooming around and going up and down, we of course didn’t hear everything that was said, but it was interesting.”

Cooksey said the FAA flight service facility guy called the facility operator in Rawlins and recalled that Kealey had been talking to the Rawlins facility.

“As I recall, the pilot (Kealey) had been on the radio talking to flight service about something, that happened a lot in those days,” he said. “And the flight service guy in Rawlins had it figured out who it was. We didn’t know at that time it was Barrett, we knew who the pilot was.”

Cooksey said his dad knew Kealey and that more broadcasts came from the plane from Barrett: “It was interesting to eerie to hear him.”

Headsets for pilots were not frequently used, and typically there would be a speaker and hand-held microphone for communication with the ground, Cooksey said. 

During the ordeal, Barrett later reported never receiving any communication from anyone. All he heard were “squelch” noises. Cooksey said it could have been due to his not completely releasing the mic button or the button being jammed.

Once above the airfield in Rawlins, Barrett told Junge that he flew over the airport two or three times at 200 knots, but it was just “ridiculous to think about landing.”

He even considered trying to land on I-80 but there was too much traffic.

Meanwhile, on the ground the Rawlins firefighters, Carbon County Sheriff’s Office deputies and Wyoming Highway Patrol and other emergency responders had been alerted to the situation above them in the air. They were trying to follow the plane as it crisscrossed the city.

Buzzing Rawlins

A Rawlins resident, Clark Whitson told a reporter in a story published in the Dec. 7, 1969, Casper Star-Tribune that he heard the plane buzzing overhead and making turns at high speed, “about wide open,” he said.

He said the plane flew low over houses and narrowly missed the Catholic Church steeple, and nearly hit the city-county building, before roaring back toward the airport.

Whitson and friends then drove to the airport. There he saw the plane flown by Barrett make passes overhead, one so low that they bailed out of their pickup.

“On the sixth or seventh pass he came in low going east and clipped a power line with one wing while making a steep bank turn,” he said.

In the cockpit, Barrett wrote in the Denver Post story that Kealey started vomiting over the control panel and then blood started flowing from his nose and mouth. His body was thrashing and pressed Barrett against the right side of the aircraft.

“My head was pinned to the window on my right, and my body was forced against the door,” he wrote. “With as much pressure as I could muster, I slowly moved George’s body away until I obtained enough leverage on the wheel to pull it back and turn it to the left.

"I had no idea where the plane was in relation to the ground, but I recall vividly seeing the top of the church where my wife and I were wed. I also recall skimming telephone poles on a street leading eastward.”

After recovering the plane, Barrett again tried to make a radio call but only heard squelch noises from the speaker. Kealey kept thrashing and moving and pushing against the yoke on his side of the plane.

Barrett pleaded with him to stay “on your side” of the plane.

Trying To Help

Meanwhile, State Aeronautics Director Marv Stevenson, alerted to the situation, had arrived in his plane above Rawlins, and Barrett recalled seeing that a plane was “attempting to guide me.”

He learned later that Stevenson was trying to direct him to the Sinclair airport, which had a longer and wider runway than the one in Rawlins.

As twilight approached at 4 p.m. in the darkest month of the year, and he grew tired from wrestling with the plane for more than an hour, Barrett wrote in the Denver Post article that he understood that the plane was short on fuel.

He flew back across Rawlins and determined he was going to land in the airport. After crossing a power line he knew was there from previous passes, he would cut the throttle and attempt a landing.

He kept his eye on what he called the “balancing gauge.”

But just as he was about to cross the power line with his left hand on the throttle, Kealey’s body lurched against the yoke and caused the right wing tip to hit the power line.

“I saw a tremendous streak of electricity shoot up and I believed the plane would explode,” he wrote. “Instead, it bounced about eight times as I flew about 50 feet above the runway. Again, almost by a miracle, I was able to pull the plane up.”

Exhausted, Barrett flew east and then banked right and headed back toward Rawlins. He did not want to stay in the air much longer because darkness was setting in and he could see vehicles gathering at the airport. He was worried that if he tried to land, the plane might veer off and hit the hangars and vehicles.

As he tried to regain altitude, Barrett recalled the plane engine cut out. He flicked a switch, hoping it was the reserve tank. Ahead, he saw level terrain and decided to bring the plane down. The motor ran for a moment, then sputtered.

The nose went down and he wrote that he pulled on the yoke to get the plane back up into a glide. Ahead he saw a small farm with a barn and fence and beyond it seemed level ground.

“I was relieved and surprisingly relaxed. I said another prayer, and I remember calling out: ‘George, please stay in your seat now,” he wrote in the Denver Post article. 

The Landing

Barrett told Junge in his interview that he knew Stevenson was flying above him. As he approached the ground, he tried to pull the nose up, like he had seen pilots do on his previous flights.

All three wheels of the Cessna hit the hard, cold Wyoming earth and the plane bounced up into the air again. Barrett told Junge he recalled thinking, “Boy, it’s going so fast that when it comes down it will be a real mess.”

When the wheels hit the ground again, all three touched and then the nose wheel collapsed. The plane, now on two wheels, was being driven into the ground and the propeller and engine began to be pushed back into the passenger compartment.

Barrett said just as he thought it was going to be all over and he would be crushed, the left wheel hit a boulder and the plane stopped and immediately flipped.

“It sent my face into the panel and with such force that it pressed my left eye back in the socket three-eighths of an inch. Broke all the bones around the eye and sent me rocketing back with such force in my chair that I broke the seat off the rail in back of me,” Barrett told Junge. “And I am upside down in the airplane with the plane tipped over on its wings.”

Barrett saw a flame in the motor and realized that he was still alive. He took his seat belt off, tried to check on Kealey, and crawled out of the plane. The door had been ripped away. He recalled using the same handkerchief that he tried to help Kealey with to stop the blood that was pouring from his own face.

A firetruck pulled up, and a firefighter ran toward Barrett. Barrett recognized him as Sam Kelly, who served on the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission.

“I was so glad to see someone, I stuck my hand out and said, ‘How are you Sam?’” he recalled.

Barrett then collapsed, unconscious.

Family Learns About Crash

Back in Cheyenne at the Barrett home, Richard Barrett, then 17, remembers that evening their doorbell rang. When he went to answer the door, Monsignor James O’Neill, their parish priest from St. Mary’s Cathedral, stood there and asked if his mother, Ann, was home.

The priest then informed the family that their husband and father had been in a plane crash and was undergoing treatment at the hospital in Rawlins.

Then an assistant attorney general, Jack Speight, called and told them that a state highway patrolman would be by to pick them up and take them to Rawlins.

“Of course we were mortified, because we were trying to visualize a situation where my dad would be in a hospital, having survived a plane crash,” Richard Barrett said.

They were taken by the highway patrolman to the hospital and walked into the room where James Barrett was being treated.

“Mom and I were absolutely shocked, because my dad looked like a bomb had exploded,” he said. “He was so bruised and battered in his face … yet he was alive, and he survived what many pilots have told me over the years would be a one in a million survival to have crash-landed a plane and got out of it.”

Richard Barrett said years later when he was a practicing attorney, he was in a cafe in Rawlins and a man walked up to him and asked if he was Richard Barrett. He then proceeded to tell him that he was a bread truck driver in Rawlins and that on one of his dad’s low flights over the city, the plane was coming right at his truck.

He recounted how he jumped out of the truck as it was moving, and it ran down another 30 feet and hit a car parked at the bottom of the hill. He had rolled into the street.

“He said my dad had pulled up just in time before hitting the street,” Richard Barrett said.

Surgery Needed

James Barrett would undergo surgery to the bones around his left eye and doctors put his eye back in place by packing gauze behind his eye, putting it in through the roof of his mouth. He had also had a compressed vertebra.

The crash occurred following the infamous Black 14 incident involving Black athletes removed from the University of Wyoming football team after they planned a protest using black armbands against Brigham Young University and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

A federal lawsuit ensued. James Barrett had been representing the state and University of Wyoming board in the case and worked on it from his hospital bed and then during home recovery, Richard Barrett said.

James Barrett told Junge that the crash investigation ruled Kealey was alive until the crash, so his family could receive workman’s compensation.

The crash story would never be far from the older Barrett’s mind, and Richard Barrett remembers his dad telling him how during the flight memories flashed before him. James Barrett told his son he thought about his family, Hathaway and their friendship, his experiences in battle overseas, and even his being able to hear in person Winston Churchill give his Lend-Lease speech to Congress in 1942 before being sent overseas.

James Barrett was the son of Frank Barrett, a longtime Wyoming congressman, governor and U.S. senator who was serving in Washington when their son was overseas.

Richard Barrett said his dad was a devout Catholic and he told his son while in the air that day he prayed a lot.

“It’s truly a miracle,” Richard Barrett said, looking back on his dad’s survival.

Dean McClain, a longtime commercial pilot and member of the Wyoming Aviation Heritage League, agrees. He said experiencing the loss of the pilot and trying to control the aircraft would have been challenging.

“You’ve got to get the airplane slowed down to land it, and I think he knew that, he wasn’t certain how to do it and that was the big issue,” he said. 

If communication had been successful from others trying to contact the plane, the situation may have resolved at the airport instead of the field outside of town. McClain said landing the plane would not have been too complicated and Barrett’s concerns about the fuel mixture and propeller pitch would have been quickly resolved.

“He was kind of awed by all the stuff on the panel,” he said. “The only things that would have mattered would have been the throttle and the trim.”

Two Pilots Policy

McClain said as a result of the crash, the state implemented a policy requiring two pilots on every state flight.

James Barrett in his interview with Junge said that while he never went up in a small plane again, he would have considered it if he knew how to operate the radio and the difference between the rudders and brakes.

“If I learned those things, I think I would have been able to land the plane,” he said.

James Barrett continued as Wyoming’s attorney general into 1971. That year he was appointed by President Richard Nixon to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit based in Denver. He died on Nov. 7, 2011, after serving more than 40 years on the bench.

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