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Monday, October 8, 2007
Wreck hunter sheds light on history
An Orange County man has spent decades finding old, forgotten aircraft wrecks and restoring them to memory.
By PAT BRENNAN
THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
PLANO TRABUCO – The young pilot might have been on a strafing run, bearing down on a mock target when he lost control of his F4U Corsair in the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains one day in 1943 or 1944.
Like most of the rest of the country, Orange County was preoccupied with the war effort, factories busily churning out aircraft parts while pilots conducted daily training flights over what, at the time, was a brush-covered bombing range.
It might have been a clear day, or it might have been rainy, the pilot's view of the hills obscured by clouds. In any case, the Corsair's wreckage sprayed in a kind of V-pattern against the hillside and up over the ridge above, scattering pieces as far as 400 feet. The pilot was likely one of two known to have crashed in the area: one who successfully bailed out before impact, one who didn't.
"Hopefully it was a bailout, and it just spun in," said Pat Macha, who specializes in finding old, forgotten aircraft wrecks – and restoring them to their place in history.
Macha, who lives in Mission Viejo, and his team of wreck hunters stumbled across the remnants of the Corsair last month while searching for a helicopter wreck in the area. Now, he is trying to nail down the pilot's identity and the circumstances of the crash.
While military personnel would have checked out the wreck at the time, made a report and, in the case of the fatal wreck, recovered the remains, they would have likely paid little further heed to another of dozens of crashes that occurred in Orange County during the war years.
For decades, the aircraft remained, the chaparral brush growing higher, the chunks of fuselage, cockpit, wing hinges, radio, instrument panel and other bits sinking further into obscurity.
Now, in the fall 2007, as Macha and his team combed the site, buried parts were revealed by metal detectors, dug up and exposed to the sun perhaps for the first time in more than 60 years.
"When you come to a spot like this, you're back to that day," he said. "This is where time stops. That's one of the fascinations. It's a bit of time travel."
A former high school history and geography teacher, Macha has been chasing down forgotten wrecks for 45 years. He has found more than 400 of them; he knows there are potentially dozens more in Orange County alone, hundreds across the state.
"When I learned this, it totally blew me away: More than 35,000 air men and women lost their lives in and around the continental U.S. during World War II," he said. "Today the accident rate is way down, across the board. Flying is much safer."
Yet despite the thrill of discovery and the deep sense of history that his efforts bring – he and others in the know refer to the work as "aviation archaeology" – the fact that the planes carried real human beings, often young people whose lives were cut short, is never far from his mind.
"One thing I'm trying to do is put a small marker with the date and the pilot's name (at the site)," he said.
Macha specializes in military wrecks, and the garage of his home looks a bit like the command center for a military operation.
On one wall is a map of the Los Angeles basin, which includes Orange County, the upland areas crowded with color-coded pins – military and civilian wrecks, sites he's visited, sites he hasn't.
He's worked in the Sierra Nevada, Mexico, Europe, even Alaska, though mostly in Orange County.
A model of the type of Corsair he recently found, its deep blue color completely authentic, hangs on one wall, a single engine, three-bladed prop plane that summons memories of the rivet-and-bolt technology of World War II.
Then there are the files – yards of shelf space filled with volumes of meticulous notes on crash locations, personnel, and any records he can find, along with photos of those involved and the crash sites.
A special service he performs, free of charge, seems to hold the most meaning for him: leading family members to the scene of a crash that took a loved one, still fresh-scrubbed and young in their memories, decades before.
He did that in January, bringing the wife of a flier who survived a midair collision in 1946 – both planes were also training Corsairs – back to the scene after he had passed away. The other pilot was killed in the crash.
"It's been an honor and a privilege for me to do it," he said.
On this day, Macha led a small caravan of wreck hunters to a neighborhood in Rancho Santa Margarita. They walked up a foothill trail, then down a steep hillside.
"There are people living within a few hundred yards of this thing and they have no idea," he said.
He and his son, Patric, also an avid wreck hunter, had been searching for a Marine helicopter that went down in the same area in 1986 in bad weather.
They later found the helicopter, but that day the search had been fruitless, not to mention hot and dusty. Then Patric saw a slug of corroded metal lying near the trail.
"This is such a fluke," Macha said.
Most of us would hardly give such bits and pieces a second look; after a few decades, the wreckage of a 33-foot, 9,000-pound plane looks like so many fragments of scrap metal, or perhaps an old appliance carelessly tossed aside.
But Macha and his team immediately see the telltale signs: a pattern of rivets only seen during World War II; the still glowing green paint used for aircraft interiors; spent rounds from machine guns mounted on the wings.
The vast interior deserts of California, or the rugged mountain ranges, can swallow aircraft whole, at times without a trace.
Macha says he has found a few wrecks with personal effects, even human remains inside.
But the location and circumstances of the vast majority of wrecks were known at the time, and even entered into military or civilian record books. So most of what Macha does is reunite the long-forgotten wrecks with their sometimes obscure and incomplete records.
It can be a tough job, especially when the first people on the scene left behind incorrect coordinates, or none at all.
During the recent search for aviator Steve Fossett in Nevada, Macha said he heard news reports suggesting the many other aircraft wrecks turned up during the search were previously unknown.
In fact, he said, virtually every one of them falls into the category of wreck he encounters most often – known, but long forgotten.
For the latest Corsair wreck, Macha is now focusing intently on discovering which company built the aircraft.
If it was Vought Sikorsky, then the pilot was neither of the two Macha has in mind.
But if it was Goodyear, he's likely found the wreckage of one of them.
The key is finding an identification plate that would provide the manufacturer's name. During his recent visit to the crash site, he and Orange County park ranger Tom Maloney, as well as Fullerton police officer Chris LeFave and construction worker Dave Schurhammer, searched high and low for such a plate, but to no avail.
His team consists of his son and about five or six other people he's run into over the years who share his passion for aviation archaeology. They quietly join him in his sometimes brutal treks through thick, woody vegetation, steep mountainsides or harsh deserts.
"It's not something you want to be doing alone in the mountains and deserts," Macha said.
Some of the biggest hazards aren't natural, but human – the operators of illegal methamphetamine labs in the Mojave, for example. A pair who likely fit the bill once cornered Macha on Bureau of Land Management property, riding up menacingly on their ATVs, sidearms on their belts, and asking him what he was doing there.
He talked his way out of it, telling the men he was simply looking for an old plane wreck and, in a sudden inspiration that might have saved his life, inventing several other team members out of thin air and telling the men they were at work just over the next hill.
Macha will continue picking over his latest wreck for some sign of the plane's – and hence the pilot's – identity.
If he finds it, he will do his best to contact any surviving family members, tell them of the wreck and offer to lead them to it.
Then, with little fanfare, he will take up the search for a new wreck.
"The big picture about Orange County is pretty amazing," he said. "The Santa Ana Mountains, where they cross into Riverside – there's a ton over there."
He smiles and adopts a prospector's tone. "There's a lot of history in them thar hills."
Monday, October 8, 2007
Wreck hunter sheds light on history
An Orange County man has spent decades finding old, forgotten aircraft wrecks and restoring them to memory.
By PAT BRENNAN
THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
PLANO TRABUCO – The young pilot might have been on a strafing run, bearing down on a mock target when he lost control of his F4U Corsair in the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains one day in 1943 or 1944.
Like most of the rest of the country, Orange County was preoccupied with the war effort, factories busily churning out aircraft parts while pilots conducted daily training flights over what, at the time, was a brush-covered bombing range.
It might have been a clear day, or it might have been rainy, the pilot's view of the hills obscured by clouds. In any case, the Corsair's wreckage sprayed in a kind of V-pattern against the hillside and up over the ridge above, scattering pieces as far as 400 feet. The pilot was likely one of two known to have crashed in the area: one who successfully bailed out before impact, one who didn't.
"Hopefully it was a bailout, and it just spun in," said Pat Macha, who specializes in finding old, forgotten aircraft wrecks – and restoring them to their place in history.
Macha, who lives in Mission Viejo, and his team of wreck hunters stumbled across the remnants of the Corsair last month while searching for a helicopter wreck in the area. Now, he is trying to nail down the pilot's identity and the circumstances of the crash.
While military personnel would have checked out the wreck at the time, made a report and, in the case of the fatal wreck, recovered the remains, they would have likely paid little further heed to another of dozens of crashes that occurred in Orange County during the war years.
For decades, the aircraft remained, the chaparral brush growing higher, the chunks of fuselage, cockpit, wing hinges, radio, instrument panel and other bits sinking further into obscurity.
Now, in the fall 2007, as Macha and his team combed the site, buried parts were revealed by metal detectors, dug up and exposed to the sun perhaps for the first time in more than 60 years.
"When you come to a spot like this, you're back to that day," he said. "This is where time stops. That's one of the fascinations. It's a bit of time travel."
A former high school history and geography teacher, Macha has been chasing down forgotten wrecks for 45 years. He has found more than 400 of them; he knows there are potentially dozens more in Orange County alone, hundreds across the state.
"When I learned this, it totally blew me away: More than 35,000 air men and women lost their lives in and around the continental U.S. during World War II," he said. "Today the accident rate is way down, across the board. Flying is much safer."
Yet despite the thrill of discovery and the deep sense of history that his efforts bring – he and others in the know refer to the work as "aviation archaeology" – the fact that the planes carried real human beings, often young people whose lives were cut short, is never far from his mind.
"One thing I'm trying to do is put a small marker with the date and the pilot's name (at the site)," he said.
Macha specializes in military wrecks, and the garage of his home looks a bit like the command center for a military operation.
On one wall is a map of the Los Angeles basin, which includes Orange County, the upland areas crowded with color-coded pins – military and civilian wrecks, sites he's visited, sites he hasn't.
He's worked in the Sierra Nevada, Mexico, Europe, even Alaska, though mostly in Orange County.
A model of the type of Corsair he recently found, its deep blue color completely authentic, hangs on one wall, a single engine, three-bladed prop plane that summons memories of the rivet-and-bolt technology of World War II.
Then there are the files – yards of shelf space filled with volumes of meticulous notes on crash locations, personnel, and any records he can find, along with photos of those involved and the crash sites.
A special service he performs, free of charge, seems to hold the most meaning for him: leading family members to the scene of a crash that took a loved one, still fresh-scrubbed and young in their memories, decades before.
He did that in January, bringing the wife of a flier who survived a midair collision in 1946 – both planes were also training Corsairs – back to the scene after he had passed away. The other pilot was killed in the crash.
"It's been an honor and a privilege for me to do it," he said.
On this day, Macha led a small caravan of wreck hunters to a neighborhood in Rancho Santa Margarita. They walked up a foothill trail, then down a steep hillside.
"There are people living within a few hundred yards of this thing and they have no idea," he said.
He and his son, Patric, also an avid wreck hunter, had been searching for a Marine helicopter that went down in the same area in 1986 in bad weather.
They later found the helicopter, but that day the search had been fruitless, not to mention hot and dusty. Then Patric saw a slug of corroded metal lying near the trail.
"This is such a fluke," Macha said.
Most of us would hardly give such bits and pieces a second look; after a few decades, the wreckage of a 33-foot, 9,000-pound plane looks like so many fragments of scrap metal, or perhaps an old appliance carelessly tossed aside.
But Macha and his team immediately see the telltale signs: a pattern of rivets only seen during World War II; the still glowing green paint used for aircraft interiors; spent rounds from machine guns mounted on the wings.
The vast interior deserts of California, or the rugged mountain ranges, can swallow aircraft whole, at times without a trace.
Macha says he has found a few wrecks with personal effects, even human remains inside.
But the location and circumstances of the vast majority of wrecks were known at the time, and even entered into military or civilian record books. So most of what Macha does is reunite the long-forgotten wrecks with their sometimes obscure and incomplete records.
It can be a tough job, especially when the first people on the scene left behind incorrect coordinates, or none at all.
During the recent search for aviator Steve Fossett in Nevada, Macha said he heard news reports suggesting the many other aircraft wrecks turned up during the search were previously unknown.
In fact, he said, virtually every one of them falls into the category of wreck he encounters most often – known, but long forgotten.
For the latest Corsair wreck, Macha is now focusing intently on discovering which company built the aircraft.
If it was Vought Sikorsky, then the pilot was neither of the two Macha has in mind.
But if it was Goodyear, he's likely found the wreckage of one of them.
The key is finding an identification plate that would provide the manufacturer's name. During his recent visit to the crash site, he and Orange County park ranger Tom Maloney, as well as Fullerton police officer Chris LeFave and construction worker Dave Schurhammer, searched high and low for such a plate, but to no avail.
His team consists of his son and about five or six other people he's run into over the years who share his passion for aviation archaeology. They quietly join him in his sometimes brutal treks through thick, woody vegetation, steep mountainsides or harsh deserts.
"It's not something you want to be doing alone in the mountains and deserts," Macha said.
Some of the biggest hazards aren't natural, but human – the operators of illegal methamphetamine labs in the Mojave, for example. A pair who likely fit the bill once cornered Macha on Bureau of Land Management property, riding up menacingly on their ATVs, sidearms on their belts, and asking him what he was doing there.
He talked his way out of it, telling the men he was simply looking for an old plane wreck and, in a sudden inspiration that might have saved his life, inventing several other team members out of thin air and telling the men they were at work just over the next hill.
Macha will continue picking over his latest wreck for some sign of the plane's – and hence the pilot's – identity.
If he finds it, he will do his best to contact any surviving family members, tell them of the wreck and offer to lead them to it.
Then, with little fanfare, he will take up the search for a new wreck.
"The big picture about Orange County is pretty amazing," he said. "The Santa Ana Mountains, where they cross into Riverside – there's a ton over there."
He smiles and adopts a prospector's tone. "There's a lot of history in them thar hills."
