WINTERSVILLE - About a dozen years ago this weekend, a piece of aviation lore was reunited with the aviation community, courtesy of simple curiosity.
The story starts March 10, 1950, in the skies over Fernwood, near what is now the Jefferson County Air Park. Two F-51 single-seat fighter planes, the postwar designation for the famous World War II Mustang fighter, from the Ohio National Guard's 166th fighter squadron, apparently were headed back to their base in Columbus when they collided in mid-air, burst into flames and crashed. One plane was piloted by 2nd Lt. William Drazic, 25, of Steubenville and the other by 2nd Lt. Neil H. Diehl, 27, of Columbus.
The Drazic aircraft crashed near Fernwood Road on the farm of Frank Strobel. The other, piloted by Diehl, crashed into a heavily wooded and rugged ravine off the far end of what is now Solter Road, into a strip-mine spoils area about three miles away.
Drazic and Diehl both died in the crash, which was front-page news in the Herald-Star and attracted attention from national wire services and other news agencies in those pre-cable network and satellite news truck days.
Three other aircraft that had been on the mission made it back to Columbus without incident.
National Guard personnel were dispatched to Jefferson County to stand guard on the crash sites to relieve local law enforcers and state troopers while investigations and recovery of the pilots and the planes took place.
The Drazic fighter, having crashed near Fernwood Road, was removed from the crash site. Diehl's airplane, being in rugged terrain, was stripped of its armaments and any munitions that survived the crash, the pilot's body was recovered and the burned remnants of the plane remained in the woods, consigned to history and the elements.
Geary Bates was all of 9 years old, a kid growing up in the rural area west of Wintersville that, in those days, was farms and cornfields.
The decades pass
Bates is now vice president of the Jefferson County Regional Airport Authority, which oversees the operations of the county airport.
He remembers kids bringing pieces of the fighters they'd found in fields to show off at school when he was in elementary school.
Bates, a pilot who took his first lesson on Pearl Harbor Day, Dec. 7, in 1987, said he and his son, Drew, started buying property in the Fernwood area and over the years, walked and walked the rugged countryside, all without ever finding a trace of the crashed, burned and abandoned Mustang of 2nd Lt. Diehl.
Then, on the Sunday after Thanksgiving in 1996, he overheard a man in his son's hunting group say, "I'll meet you down at the blade."
"I asked him, 'What blade is that,' and he said there was an old mine machine blade on a hill with two pieces sticking out of the ground. I told him that wasn't a mine blade but an airplane propeller," Bates recalls.
Upon walking the deep hollows behind the Crossridge landfill, areas that were strip mined decades ago, Bates said the hunter took him to "the blade." Bates said the propeller and some aluminum pieces and other small items were left from the Mustang fighter. He talked to the property owner and was told it was OK to retrieve the prop and other items.
Bates said it took a bulldozer, and a truck with a winch on it to pull the dozer uphill, to get the propeller out of the ground, where one blade was buried deep and one had come off. There also was a gearbox on the propeller.
"They're not made out of aluminum," Bates said of the propeller blades. "That thing is heavy. It's honeycombed steel halves."
Bates stored the propeller and gearbox for years, eventually deciding a perfect place to put them on display would be outside the Ralph Freshwater Terminal at the Jefferson County Air Park when it was completed in the mid-summer of 2008.
Bates recently completed the installation with a board containing the Herald-Star's page-one story about the crash. Bates said from what he's been able to learn over the years, the planes apparently had taken off from Columbus and landed at Allegheny County to refuel near Pittsburgh. On the way back the two planes collided and crashed west of Steubenville. Bates said the stories for years were that there were parts of the plane somewhere in the woods near Fernwood, including chunks of the 12-cylinder Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, a huge piece of machinery. All that was found, though, was the propeller.
Bates figures the mine spoil shifted and buried the engine and any other remaining parts that weren't taken by scavengers or removed as scrap when the strip mining was being done in the area decades ago.
The propeller is now a shiny black, twisted item resembling a modern art sculpture to those who aren't too aviation initiated. But a close inspection reveals the twisted piece is part of an airplane whose ancestors had been credited by pilots with helping win the air war over Europe during World War II.
(Giannamore can be contacted at pgiannamore@heraldstaronline.com.)
