Livingston Manor, NY Plane Crashes On Mountain, June 1934

AIR LINER'S BURNED WRECKAGE FOUND NEAR LIVINGSTON MANOR WITH 7 DEAD.

AIRLINES CHIEF GETS WORD OF TRAGIC DISCOVERY NEAR LIVINGSTON MANOR.

Long Hunt Is Ended.

Mountains Combed Since Early Sunday by Army of Searchers.

Livingston Manor, June 11 (UP) -- The big American Air Line transport plane, which vanished with seven persons aboard while flying from Newark to Chicago by way of Syracuse and Buffalo, Saturday evening, was found in the rolling Catskill Mountains today, destroyed by fire and with all of its occupants dead.
The plane, object of a wide search by land and air since Sunday dawn, was found by WILLIAM H. HALLOCK and LEE LEWIS, two volunteer fliers.
HALLOCK told the United Press that the passenger plane was a tangled mass of wreckage, twisted and destroyed by fire. He said that the occupants apparently did not have a chance to escape.
HALLOCK and LEWIS found the demolished plane at 11 A.M. while the huge search was being concentrated slightly north adn east of this district in the historic Catskill region where the Rip Van Winkle legend originated.
The transport plane, with four passengers, a pilot, co-pilot and stewardess, had left Newark at 4 P.M. Saturday and reported 43 minutes later that all was well over Newburgh, up the Hudson River. Then it vanished into a thundershower.
Those aboard the plane were:
HOLBROOK, CLYDE, pilot, 33, of La Grange, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, an Army ace in the World War and one of American Airlines crack pilots, with more than 10,000 hours of flying.
BARRON, JR., JOHN, better known as "TAB BARRON", 33, co-pilot, of Chicago, a flier of seven years experience with 2,000 hours of flying, recently transferred from the South.
HUCKEBY, MISS MARGARET, 23, stewardess, of Chicago, a graduate nurse from the Jackson Park Hospital, Chicago, reported sole support of her family, who live in Henshaw, Ky.
PINSLEY, HARRY H., address reported by air company as 114 Station Road, Great Neck, L. I., but had moved recently to an unascertained, address in New York City.
COPPINS, HAROLD C., 39, of 88 Middlesex Road, Buffalo, general superintendent of F. V. Burt Company, Inc., paper manufacturers.
CASS, WILLIAM A., 28, of 37 Woodbridge Avenue, Buffalo, a director of the F. V. Burt Company.
BADEE, WILLIAM E., 30, of 602 Colvia Parkway, Buffalo, chief chemist of the Semet-Holvay Coke Company.
The Department of Commerce suppressed first information concerning the finding of the plane, pending arrival of officials for an investigation. The local owner started for the scene, about 11 miles north of Livingston Manor, shortly after noon.
The terrain where the plane was found is mountainous and thickly wooded. The trees are so close together that a plane might crash among them and remain undiscovered unless searchers flew directly over it.
There are a number of small bodies of water in this locality, and occassionally an isolated house can be seen, but for the most part uninterrupted forest lands meet the air pilots eye.
Air currents along the valleys give the aviator difficulties too. It is "bumpy" and the pilot must watch out for sudden and dangerous drops in the vicinity of the higher points of ground.
So obscuring is the woodland country to aviators' eyes that DEAN SMITH, an ace pilot for the American Airways, flying a big Ford trimotor plane with a United Press correspondent aboard, cruised back and forth over 50 square miles of territory for several hours without being able to locate the wreckage. SMITH took off from Newark shortly after dawn.

Syracuse Herald New York 1934-06-11
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Researched and Transcribed by Stu Beitler. Thank you, Stu!