On the afternoon of Sunday, April 6, 1980, a single-engine Cessna came down in a farm field in the Arbon Valley, and its pilot was killed. The only account found is a short item in the next day's Idaho State Journal, sent from American Falls and printed on the paper's City-Region page among the weekend's police and accident news.
The pilot was David Dean Woodruff, 47, of Huntington Beach, California. The Journal put his departure from the Idaho Falls airport at about 2:30 that afternoon, though it hedged on the time. Before going he had been given a weather briefing for a route to Cedar City, in southern Utah, and from there to Los Angeles. He was down within about half an hour. At roughly three o'clock his Cessna struck a farm field in the Arbon Valley, southeast of American Falls, on land the paper identified as "the Bunnie Johnson farm." The crash killed him on the spot.
What brought the plane down was not known. A spokeswoman for the Power County Sheriff's Office offered two possibilities. One was a mechanical problem in the engine; the other was that Woodruff had lost his bearings in the heavy wind and snow of a storm that was blowing at the time. The inquiry into the cause was still open, the paper said; the agency's initials came out wrong in print, but it evidently meant the Federal Aviation Administration.
The Journal did not say who Bunnie Johnson was or where in the valley the farm lay. The Pocatello papers had written about a Bunnie Johnson of Arbon eighteen years earlier. In November 1962 the Journal reported that Loretta M. Johnson, 16, a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Frank Johnson of Arbon Valley and known as Bunnie, had won a sectional 4-H forestry award and a trip to the National 4-H Club Congress in Chicago. In January 1963 the Idaho Sunday Journal added that the special forestry projects set for her by the University of Idaho's extension forester, Vernon Burlison, were done on her parents' farm, which covered 2,610 acres. The nickname is not a common one, and it is likely that the farm of 1980 was this family's, but the crash report does not say so, nor whether the farm was then in Bunnie's own name. Her father was probably the Frank Johnson of Arbon who died in 2013 and was remembered at a memorial service at the Arbon LDS Church.
The item is brief. It does not say whether anyone else was aboard, who found the plane or how, or which field it struck. It describes the aircraft only as a Cessna Turbo, without a model number. No report of what the investigators concluded has turned up for this post, and no later story in the Pocatello paper has been found.
On this site: earlier air crashes in and near the valley, including the B-24 bomber of 1944, the Stinson found west of Kinport Peak in 1944, the three Pocatello fliers near Rattlesnake Creek in 1950, the pilot killed near Bannock Peak in 1961, the crop duster near Midnight Summit in 1962 and the Aztec on the Hayden ranch in 1963.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, April 7, 1980, page 11. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
A single-engine Cessna crashed on a farm in the Arbon Valley on the afternoon of Sunday, April 6, 1980, and the California man at its controls was killed. The Journal ran the news the next day in a brief item datelined American Falls.
The pilot was David Dean Woodruff, 47, whose home was Huntington Beach. Nearly all of the item rested on what a spokeswoman for the Power County Sheriff's Office told the paper.
By her account, the flight had been short. As best she could tell, he took off from the Idaho Falls airport at 2:30 p.m. His destination was Cedar City, with Los Angeles beyond it, and he had been through a weather briefing for that route before he went. The Cessna Turbo, as the paper described the aircraft, was in the air only about thirty minutes. It was close to 3 p.m. when the plane went into a field on Bunnie Johnson's farm. The spokeswoman said the crash killed Woodruff outright.
The spokeswoman did not know what had gone wrong, and she named two possibilities without choosing between them. One was mechanical, a failure somewhere in the engine. The other was the weather: a storm of heavy wind and snow was moving through, and Woodruff might simply have lost track of where he was.
The cause was in the hands of federal investigators, whose work was not finished when the paper went to press. The agency appeared in print as the FFA, evidently a slip for the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration.
No passenger was mentioned, and the item did not say who found the wreck, how it was reached, or where on the farm it lay.