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Father remembers search for missing plane
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| H&N photo by Todd E. Swenson John Pryor uses a magnifying glass to find points on an old map of the Crater Lake area where he spent several years searching for a plane carrying his son in 1975. The plane wreckage was not found until 1982. |
April 12, 2007
John Pryor, 79, still lives in the same house where he lived Feb. 26, 1975, when he got the call that a private plane in which his son, Jim, was a passenger, was missing.
He couldn't know it would remain missing until 1982, despite his 2-1/2 years of extensive searching. The wreckage found on the north side of Huckleberry Mountain near Crater Lake National Park.
Jim Pryor, 17, was one of two students lost in the crash of a Cessna 182 on a flight back from Salem. The crash also took the life of the pilot and flight instructor, Dave Nunn, and Matt Perkins, Pryor's classmate at Klamath Union High School.
“He was just getting used to the instrument panel,” John Pryor said of his son. “He took the exam on all points on flying from his instruction books shortly before the flight and got 90 percent.”
His son picked up an interest in planes and flying from his father, who served in the Air Force, Air National Guard and Civil Air Patrol. Together, they shared a hobby of building model radio-controlled planes, which still hang in Pryor's garage. Taking flying lessons at Southern Oregon Aviation was a natural progression of his interest.
“It was 10 p.m. when I got a call that the plane was overdue in a blizzard. The next morning the official search began,” Pryor said. “I went out and got Matt's brother, and he and Mary, my wife, took a locator receiver and drove around Crater Lake. The first report we got was that it was in Crater Lake. Seattle radar had been tracking them, but a little north of Crater Lake, they lost them, and the radar on Hamaker Mountain didn't pick them up.”
Exhaustive searches
An exhaustive search by Klamath County Emergency Services Rescue Unit, Bend Radio Group, Klamath Basin Snowdrifters, the Civil Air Patrol and many volunteers, including eight planes from Medford, of the plane's intended flight path yielded no results.
They expanded the search and followed all leads, including one sighting of smoke, a report of footprints in the snow and another of residents hearing a plane that evening near Union Creek, a plane which turned around. They even followed a lead near Merrill and Malin, thinking the plane might have overshot the airport in Klamath Falls.
“The owner of the Lakeview airport came over and let me fly his plane. Ace Bigby, a Klamath Falls cropduster, and Jim Enman helped me search. Usually we would go out two at a time. I wrote up a record of each flight.”
Dangerous fog and blizzard conditions forced a temporary stop to a search after about a week.
It resumed and went on, off and on, into July, when searchers still had trouble getting around in the snow. For several years after, Company B and the sheriff's department would include searching for the plane as part of their exercises.
Pryor persevered and explained how he decided where to search.
“Radar was reporting their airspeed, location and altitude. I plotted it on plastic and overlaid it on the flight path. They had drifted west of the line of flight. Accounting for drift, I was close, surprisingly close, to where the wreckage was. I must have gone past it a number of times.”
Pryor opened a Forest Service map, one of many different types of maps - geodetic, topographic and aerial navigation - he used while flying and ground searching. He preferred topographical maps because he could tell where steep slopes and low areas were.
This map is a patchwork of red diagonal lines indicating where he searched. He leaned close to the paper, using a magnifying glass, because he has macular degeneration.
“These are all the areas I searched myself. After a while, my wife didn't want me to go out alone any more, so she went with me.”
On another map, he had marked straight lines radiating out from Klamath Falls. He pointed to one.
“This is the flight path they should have been on, but they were off the flight plan. I was looking for shelters where they might have taken cover. I searched in planes, cars, snowmobiles and on snowshoes.”
His gut feeling was that they were somewhere in the Union Creek/Prospect area because of reports of a plane having been heard there that evening.
The search was concentrated south of there, but unknown to any of the searchers the plane had gone down north of Union Creek on the north side of Huckleberry Mountain.
He went out every day for three or four weeks, then had to return to his job. He then searched on weekends.
“The search became an obsession,” he admitted, “and there were times I wondered why I was out there.”
Angels?
One search in the wilderness became a near tragedy for him, and a time of decision-making.
“I made a mistake,” he said. “I went out further than I should have, down into Hole-in-the-Ground. Rather than go back up the draw, I went up the mountain. I got up on top as it was getting dark, and I didn't have a flashlight with me. I had left it in the truck. I had a pack of matches and tried to read the map, but the wind would blow out the flame.”
It was pitch black. He knew he was facing east. He stood still, saying a silent prayer and trying to figure out what he would do.
“Directly out of the darkness I saw two bright lights come on - was it an automobile? At my altitude I realized it had to be a car on Crater Lake rim. That told me where I was.”
He had picked up a straight, strong limb almost as tall as he was. He started swinging it back and forth in the darkness to determine if any obstacles were in his path.
“As I started down, my feet flew out from under me and I sat down hard. I started swinging the pole - nothing. It was a drop-off. I moved in another direction and was able to get off the mountain OK and onto the road. “
He firmly believes angels were with him that day. He still has that pole and, in a drawer, the binoculars he bought to use during his search.
A decision
“I decided then to let the dead bury the dead. I had living at home to take care of.”
When he received the call from the sheriff's department in 1982 that the wreckage had been found, he was asked if he wanted to go to the site. He told them as long as they were sure it was the plane, he didn't want to go up there.
He concentrates on the good memories now, of times he and Jim worked on model planes, of what a good boy he was, and of the time he himself spent in the service of his country.
Most fondly, he remembers the time he spent in the Civil Air Patrol from 1943 to 1964, nurturing as many as 100 cadets at a time, and their successes. He speaks as proudly of them as if they were sons.
He still praises all the organizations and volunteers who searched, and said, “This community has been this way any time someone needed help.”
- Lee Beach
John Pryor, 79, still lives in the same house where he lived Feb. 26, 1975, when he got the call that a private plane in which his son, Jim, was a passenger, was missing.
He couldn't know it would remain missing until 1982, despite his 2-1/2 years of extensive searching. The wreckage found on the north side of Huckleberry Mountain near Crater Lake National Park.
Jim Pryor, 17, was one of two students lost in the crash of a Cessna 182 on a flight back from Salem. The crash also took the life of the pilot and flight instructor, Dave Nunn, and Matt Perkins, Pryor's classmate at Klamath Union High School.
“He was just getting used to the instrument panel,” John Pryor said of his son. “He took the exam on all points on flying from his instruction books shortly before the flight and got 90 percent.”
His son picked up an interest in planes and flying from his father, who served in the Air Force, Air National Guard and Civil Air Patrol. Together, they shared a hobby of building model radio-controlled planes, which still hang in Pryor's garage. Taking flying lessons at Southern Oregon Aviation was a natural progression of his interest.
“It was 10 p.m. when I got a call that the plane was overdue in a blizzard. The next morning the official search began,” Pryor said. “I went out and got Matt's brother, and he and Mary, my wife, took a locator receiver and drove around Crater Lake. The first report we got was that it was in Crater Lake. Seattle radar had been tracking them, but a little north of Crater Lake, they lost them, and the radar on Hamaker Mountain didn't pick them up.”
Exhaustive searches
An exhaustive search by Klamath County Emergency Services Rescue Unit, Bend Radio Group, Klamath Basin Snowdrifters, the Civil Air Patrol and many volunteers, including eight planes from Medford, of the plane's intended flight path yielded no results.
They expanded the search and followed all leads, including one sighting of smoke, a report of footprints in the snow and another of residents hearing a plane that evening near Union Creek, a plane which turned around. They even followed a lead near Merrill and Malin, thinking the plane might have overshot the airport in Klamath Falls.
“The owner of the Lakeview airport came over and let me fly his plane. Ace Bigby, a Klamath Falls cropduster, and Jim Enman helped me search. Usually we would go out two at a time. I wrote up a record of each flight.”
Dangerous fog and blizzard conditions forced a temporary stop to a search after about a week.
It resumed and went on, off and on, into July, when searchers still had trouble getting around in the snow. For several years after, Company B and the sheriff's department would include searching for the plane as part of their exercises.
Pryor persevered and explained how he decided where to search.
“Radar was reporting their airspeed, location and altitude. I plotted it on plastic and overlaid it on the flight path. They had drifted west of the line of flight. Accounting for drift, I was close, surprisingly close, to where the wreckage was. I must have gone past it a number of times.”
Pryor opened a Forest Service map, one of many different types of maps - geodetic, topographic and aerial navigation - he used while flying and ground searching. He preferred topographical maps because he could tell where steep slopes and low areas were.
This map is a patchwork of red diagonal lines indicating where he searched. He leaned close to the paper, using a magnifying glass, because he has macular degeneration.
“These are all the areas I searched myself. After a while, my wife didn't want me to go out alone any more, so she went with me.”
On another map, he had marked straight lines radiating out from Klamath Falls. He pointed to one.
“This is the flight path they should have been on, but they were off the flight plan. I was looking for shelters where they might have taken cover. I searched in planes, cars, snowmobiles and on snowshoes.”
His gut feeling was that they were somewhere in the Union Creek/Prospect area because of reports of a plane having been heard there that evening.
The search was concentrated south of there, but unknown to any of the searchers the plane had gone down north of Union Creek on the north side of Huckleberry Mountain.
He went out every day for three or four weeks, then had to return to his job. He then searched on weekends.
“The search became an obsession,” he admitted, “and there were times I wondered why I was out there.”
Angels?
One search in the wilderness became a near tragedy for him, and a time of decision-making.
“I made a mistake,” he said. “I went out further than I should have, down into Hole-in-the-Ground. Rather than go back up the draw, I went up the mountain. I got up on top as it was getting dark, and I didn't have a flashlight with me. I had left it in the truck. I had a pack of matches and tried to read the map, but the wind would blow out the flame.”
It was pitch black. He knew he was facing east. He stood still, saying a silent prayer and trying to figure out what he would do.
“Directly out of the darkness I saw two bright lights come on - was it an automobile? At my altitude I realized it had to be a car on Crater Lake rim. That told me where I was.”
He had picked up a straight, strong limb almost as tall as he was. He started swinging it back and forth in the darkness to determine if any obstacles were in his path.
“As I started down, my feet flew out from under me and I sat down hard. I started swinging the pole - nothing. It was a drop-off. I moved in another direction and was able to get off the mountain OK and onto the road. “
He firmly believes angels were with him that day. He still has that pole and, in a drawer, the binoculars he bought to use during his search.
A decision
“I decided then to let the dead bury the dead. I had living at home to take care of.”
When he received the call from the sheriff's department in 1982 that the wreckage had been found, he was asked if he wanted to go to the site. He told them as long as they were sure it was the plane, he didn't want to go up there.
He concentrates on the good memories now, of times he and Jim worked on model planes, of what a good boy he was, and of the time he himself spent in the service of his country.
Most fondly, he remembers the time he spent in the Civil Air Patrol from 1943 to 1964, nurturing as many as 100 cadets at a time, and their successes. He speaks as proudly of them as if they were sons.
He still praises all the organizations and volunteers who searched, and said, “This community has been this way any time someone needed help.”
- Lee Beach
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