1963 Trail Machines Salvage Air Force Planes - 1-Page Vintage Motorcycle Article

Description

1963 Trail Machines Salvage Air Force Planes - 1-Page Vintage Motorcycle Article
Original, vintage magazine article
Page Size: Approx. 8" x 11" (21 cm x 28 cm)
Condition: Good
REBIRTH
of a
BOMBER
Trail Machines Play
Important Role in
Salvaging Air Force
Planes From Remote
Mountain Crashes
LOST World War II Liberator overshot its Colorado Springs runway by one-and-a-
half minutes and disintegrated against a ridge overlooking present site of Air Force
Academy.
PLANES first started piling into the
country’s rocky backbone when the
Air Corps took over the job of carry-
ing the U.S. Air Mail in the early ’30’s.
Tragedy after tragedy is marked by a
three-cornered scar in the timber and
a telltale glitter of shredded aluminum.
Guided to fresh wrecks today by heli-
copters and Forest Wardens who know
every slope of every watershed, Air
Force Rescue teams and county offi-
cials search for survivors. All too often
they find only burned and dismembered
bodies. They paint a yellow cross on
the biggest piece of the wreck visible
from the air (oi' on a rock or on criss-
crossed tree trunks), remove or blow
up the bombsight and any classified
cargo which survived the flames of the
burning fuel, and plot the wreck’s lo-
cation by longitude and latitude on a
map in Kansas City.
They sack up the bodies and carry
them out by hand, helicopter, or con-
tract pack train.
Occasionally a plane will come down
in enough of a piece to justify a gov-
ernment appraisal and sale by sealed
bids. Even more rarely they fall near
enough to a road for a military truck
to haul the pieces to the nearest post
for disposal as salvage. Some fall into
high mountain lakes to be discovered
by skin-divers. Some, wings battered
off, slide under concealing tree limbs
and may be discovered by hunters rec-
ognizing such a tiny clue as a wing
light lens scraped off in a high moun-
tain pass months or years later.
New timber access roads approach
old wrecks and make them reachable
by Jeeps and trail scooters which had
not been invented when the planes
blundered into cliffs or got caught in
dropping air currents known as
“sinkers.”
Mostly, though, the wrecks lie high
on mountainsides and the nearest ap-
proaches are by gold prospectors’ trails
abandoned in the last century.
In time, forgotten by everyone, the
mountain scars will heal and the crash
sites will be isolated patches of aspens
among the evergreens. Queer iron de-
vices, landing gear too heavy to move,
will sprawl in the undergrowth while
twisters scatter the lighter wreckage.
Insects and small animals will uncover
and dispose of the extra human parts
left behind.
These pictures tell the story of a
B-24. Most of its metal is back at
work again in other, more prosaic
forms, producing revenues to pay for
bigger and better bombers.
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