****HISTORICAL**** P-38 crash, Prince George BC

[iflyforpie]

So one of our flight medics flew his last flight before retiring after decades of service yesterday. We had a little gathering at work after since we all work in close proximity with each other anyways.

The discussion started with whether we did a barrel roll or a low and over or something for his last flight to which we replied, no. The weather was not really conducive for such antics and professionalism seems to reign supreme here, now, mostly.

Of course, it wasn’t always that way, and the retiring medic reminisced about the antics of their previous pilots in another day and age actually not so long ago.

But... no pilot in Prince George could ever top Frank Pynn.

Who...?

You’ve never heard of Frank Pynn?

No.

And it turns out from searching topics here, nobody on AvCanada has, either.

Story begins now:

Less than a mile from the busy downtown of Prince George, B.C., lies a deep ravine. The area is shrouded in silence where stillness is broken only by chattering squirrels or chirping birds. Windfalls, uprooted trees, underbrush, foliage and years of fallen leaves almost completely hide what remains of a P-38 Lightning aircraft, while devil's club and thistle protect the site from all sides. The wreckage: portions of wings, fuel tanks, propellers and engines, is scattered over the area.

Those engines roared to life for the last time on June 25, 1956.

Frank Pynn, a 32 year old former Royal Air Force Bomber Command pilot left the lounge of a local hotel around 5 o'clock in the afternoon. He and his navigator/photographer, Bruce Hill, 30, had spent a few hours there enjoying a few beers.

Pynn was a competent flyer with absolutely no lack of confidence. He was licensed to fly in England, Canada and the USA. During his flying career, he accumulated around 4,000 flying hours, in excess of 20 them on the P-38. After the Second World War, he became a Canadian citizen but made his home in California after taking up air survey work.

Pynn was equally at home at high altitude or at the low level precision flying that was required to drag a magnetometer over mineral-rich northern Canada.

He and the crew arrived to Prince George on June 13 from Los Angeles.

The P-38 was chartered by the Federal Government from Vancouver Aero Surveys Ltd., a subsidiary of Fairchild Aircraft of California, to photograph some 600,000 square miles of northern Canada from Edmonton to the Queen Charlotte Islands. The job was expected to take two months. It was a job, in Pynn's words, "of extreme monotony punctuated by moment of sheer terror."

On that Monday afternoon, Pynn started to head for the airport to pick up the mail for the crew. He never got the mail. No one knows why, somewhere between the town and the airport, he decided to take the Lightning out of the hangar and fly it. Perhaps to check the plane's radio equipment that had been defective a few days earlier and had been repaired by Allan Clarke, radio operator for the Department of Transport in Prince George. Pynn checked with Clarke when he arrived at the airport. Clarke had detected the smell of alcohol on Pynn's breath but believed he was sober because the way Pynn could discuss with him the intricacies of his radio indicated to Clarke that Pynn was "in full possession of his senses." Pynn, with his impending flight in mind, casually asked if anybody wanted to accompany him.

Clarke's 15 year old son, Jimmy, who had just arrived back from a Vancouver boarding school on the bus couple of hours earlier grabbed the opportunity. He loved aeroplanes and this was his big chance to fly for the first time, on top of it, in one of World War II's hottest aircraft.

The P-38 had been readied for the next day's mission and it was fully loaded with fuel, including the auxiliary tanks. Pynn and the youngster climbed into the plane (Jimmy sat behind the pilot in the piggy-back seat) and taxied out for take-off. The pilot's radio transmission reached Clarke loud and clear. Clarke gave the take-off clearance. He noticed that the pilot seemed to take an unusually long time over his cockpit check, but finally released the brakes and made a normal take-off. The Lightning returned over the airport a few minutes later in a "screaming dive" and "shot up" the airport.

According to an eyewitness, Pynn approached the administration building at a height of "not more than 15 or 20 feet" above the ground level and cleared the control tower "by only a few feet". Then he turned toward the town. Hundreds of city residents saw the Lightning roar over the houses at low level. Low it was indeed! Ball players on a field (now the site of the Civic Centre) "hit the deck from fright" as the P-38 zoomed dangerously low overhead and then clipped a tree in the Winnipeg Street area.

The screaming sweep over the city at a height of only about 150 feet alarmed a large segment of the population. The airport office of Canadian Pacific Airlines received a telephone call about the antics of the plane but the report ironically and tragically was never relayed to the only person who could contact the plane and ask Pynn to return to the airport or at least confine his flying to higher altitude, Mr. Clarke. But Clarke was not aware of the situation and the only people who could have told him did not think it was necessary! Meanwhile, the Lightning was heading east toward Six Mile (now Tabor) Lake made a sweep over it then swung back toward the city crossing the Fraser River near the PGE (now BC Rail) bridge. It just missed the top of the Prince George Hotel as it headed toward the cutbanks of the Nechako River.

Eyewitnesses' accounts differ on what happened next. The Lightning roaring toward the cutbanks went into a half roll, seemed to fall over on its back and nosed toward the ground. Before the plane hit the trees, the throb of the engines mounted to a brief roar indicating that the pilot was trying to get the nose up by applying more power. But it was too late. "A tongue of white flame leaped 200 feet into the air, there was a muffled explosion, like thunder, and black smoke wound up of the trees."

The tragedy happened approximately two minutes after 7 o'clock. Police and BC Forest Service personnel found the smoldering remains of the aircraft in a deep ravine. The scene was one of appalling destruction. Hardly a single component of the plane was readily recognizable. The largest piece was little more than six feet in length. Charred remains of the parachute were hanging grotesquely from the branch of a tree. Reconstruction of the few seconds leading up to the crash from salvaged portions of the aircraft was impossible. "Evidence at the scene of the crash showed that the plane dove almost straight into the ground shearing the tops of only a handful of small saplings in its descent."

The subsequent inquest found that Pynn died "through his own neglect and complete disregard for the Aeronautical Regulations of Canada."

Today, in the Prince George cemetery two graves are the silent reminders of a spectacular but tragic "air show" that took place five and a half decades ago.


*************************************************************************


The Lockheed P-38 Lightning was famous for its wartime exploits in the Pacific but in peacetime it found ready work as a high altitude camera platform. CF-HSC was built in 1943 as a P-38L-5-LO then converted into an F-5G-6-LO, a photo-reconnaissance variant. After the war she had a career as an air racer before being converted into a survey machine.

http://www.calgarymosquitosociety.com/f ... ture15.htm

[PT6-114A]

Fascinating story! My biological grandfather was killed in a lightning with spartan air service in what would have been the late 50s out of CYOW on a maintenance flight. Believe it was an engine failure on takeoff.
Thanks for the read.

[bring me the horizon]

Truly fascinating! I lived in PG for 8 years and this is the first I've heard of that story. So is there still wreckage in the Cutbanks? TM finally retire?

[iflyforpie]

Truly fascinating! I lived in PG for 8 years and this is the first I've heard of that story. So is there still wreckage in the Cutbanks? TM finally retire?

Unfortunately TM passed away from cancer 3 years ago. RH finally retired.

The only place that fits the description for the crash site is McMillan Creek and I think I have my plans for days off to go see what I can find.

[laminar]

Thanks for posting that story. Let us know if you find it. This quarantine business has me partly living vicariously through other people's solo missions so I'd genuinely love to hear about it!

[hinterland_1]

When I was a boy about 7 years old my sister and I were playing outside on my fathers farm out on the what was then called the Giscome road, in the area near the present Ferndale Hall. We heard a loud roar and to our surprise there was a large, well to us it was large airplane skimming across our timothy grass field. I remember it was so low it was brushing the grass. It then roared away back towards Prince George. It then went silent for a time then again we heard a higher pitched roar, silence for a few seconds, several boom boom booms and then a large plume of smoke. We ran in to our house and told our mother about the event but she did not believe us, probably because she was running our gasoline powered washing machine at the time and did not hear it! My father who at the time worked for the BC Forest Service attended the crash site to help put out the fire as the area was not in the city boundaries at the time. My father who was a war veteran had seen carnage in the war but said the sight of the bodies was horrific being scattered amongst the trees. He took myself and my sister to the crash site weeks later, the only parts to me recognizable were the two engines down in the gully. I remember seeing the first tree top clipped by the plane, then the next tree cut in half at the centre of the tree, and the last tree which was quite large had been cut off at the stump. I am trying to remember the exact site of the crash, but being so young then I think it was to the east of the Hart highway about a mile from the old Nechacko river bridge.

[spynn]

Frank Pynn was my grandfather. I'd love to know more about this. Stephen Bathy contacted me years ago and sent me a short book he wrote about this story and sent me a copy of it. I've heard he's since passed but I appreciate the great detail he gave surrounding my grandfather's untimely death. I have his briefcase and his wallet that was burned including some war photos he carried with him during his time in RAF. Thank you to all writing about this as I'm trying to piece together what information we have about him as my grandmother, Audrey, rarely spoke about him and passed away several years ago.
Stacey

[waterruddersup]

Being born and raised in PG, specifically, on the Hart Highway, this story was quite the read for me. As a kid, my friends and I would ride down to McMillan Creek to go fishing (behind the Husky gas station), and often would continue down to Hoferkamp Rd. and on up to the cutbanks. It's been about 30 years since PG was my home, though it's not hard to narrow a possible crash site down to the deep ravine just below the Hart Highway, just up from where the creek joins the Nechako.

I look forward to taking a hike up into that ravine and seeing what might be lying about. More than a little curious to know if anyone has any other info that might narrow it down. One reply mentioned about a mile east of the creek, though there's not really any ravine to be found down that way.

At the time of this crash, my grandpa "Tex" would have been living either up the Hart or just across the Nechako directly across from the cutbanks at what was once called Fraser Flats. How I wish he were still alive to hear his memory of this.