On the night of Saturday, March 23, 1963, two small charter planes flying home to Pocatello from Salt Lake City went down in bad weather. One, a twin-engine Piper Aztec, was found the next morning on the Ben L. Hayden ranch north of Crystal, in the Arbon Valley southwest of Pocatello. Its pilot and his passenger were dead. The Stories page gives the event in brief. The Utah papers of Monday, March 25, add how the flights came about, the last radio word from the Aztec and the search over the valley. A crash-site web page recording a visit in 2013 adds an account of the crash and of the site fifty years on.
An errand for stranded passengers
The trip began with another airline's trouble. On Saturday a Western Air Lines flight from Great Falls, Montana, to Salt Lake City, a Douglas DC-6B, blew a tire on its nose wheel as it landed at Pocatello. Eight of its passengers chartered two planes from Airways Inc., a Pocatello flying service, to carry them on to Salt Lake City, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.
Allen J. Manning, the president of Airways Inc., flew the larger plane, a six-place Piper Aztec. The Tribune called him "a prominent Pocatello mortician." The United Press International story carried by the Provo Daily Herald and the Logan Herald Journal said he was a former Bannock County coroner. The Herald Journal's printing added that he was a brother of Representative Darrell Manning, a Bannock County Democrat, and went on: "They were partners in the flying firm." With Manning rode Wayne Koch, who worked for a gas pipeline company. In the wire story's words, "Koch was going along for the ride." Wayne L. Carter, also of Pocatello, flew the second plane, a Piper Apache with room for five.
Carter landed at Salt Lake Municipal Airport a little after 8:40 that evening, several minutes behind Manning. Both planes took off for home within ten to fifteen minutes of landing their passengers, and on the return Carter flew alone. Federal Aviation Agency officials at Pocatello said one plane radioed its position on the way back at 9:32 p.m., and the other made the same report several minutes later. Then Manning reported that his plane was icing and that he had lost 600 feet of altitude. That, the Tribune said, was the last word from either plane.
On the Hayden ranch
Searchers in the air found the Aztec early on Sunday, March 24, and ground parties found the two men. The plane had come down on the Ben L. Hayden ranch north of Crystal. This was very probably Ben Lynn Hayden, a son of the homesteader John Hayden, who had taken over the Hayden family farm at Crystal after his brother Norman's death in 1950. The wire story said the plane had "pancaked into the earth in the Arbon Valley." Manning and Koch were thrown from it and killed instantly, and the wreck was partly burned. The papers gave Manning's age as 38 or 39. The Tribune gave Koch's as 31, though the Stories entry notes that Koch's obituary gives a birth year of 1922.
The Tribune's front-page story was datelined Pocatello. Its byline is scrambled in the scanned page, but it appears to read Carl Hayden, Tribune staff writer. That was probably Carl E. Hayden, Ben's older brother, who grew up at Crystal and was for many years the Tribune's roving correspondent. If so, he was reporting a crash on his brother's ranch. The paper also printed a map tracing the planes' routes.
The search for the Apache
Carter's plane was still missing. Chet Moulton, Idaho's director of aeronautics, took charge of the search. According to UPI, he said about 25 planes took part on Sunday afternoon. The Tribune counted more than 30, which "braved severe turbulence" over the area, and the commander of the Idaho Civil Air Patrol wing flew in from Boise. Farmers had reported hearing a plane on Saturday night. When nothing was found, the search turned to the country around Rattlesnake Creek, the same general area where the Aztec lay. Rattlesnake Creek is one of the two main creeks of the Crystal basin that run down to Bannock Creek; the Crystal area history describes the country.
On Monday the search parties left Pocatello at dawn. The UPI report that day pointed two ways. Reports of an explosion and a flash late Saturday night had led the coordinators to think Carter might have overshot Pocatello in the storm, and the search of 25 small planes moved into the area northwest of the city. Yet the same story placed the second day's hunt in the Rattlesnake Creek area of Arbon Valley, about fifteen miles southwest. As the Stories entry records, Carter's scorched plane was spotted on Monday afternoon in the Deep Creek Mountains, about sixteen miles southwest of Pocatello, and his body was recovered. Whether that place lies inside the valley is not clear from the reports.
The crash site fifty years on
A website that records aircraft wrecks in the West has a short page on the Aztec, which notes a visit to the site on May 24, 2013, fifty years after the crash. It says the plane went down in a snowstorm on the evening of March 23 and that ice on the wings kept it from holding altitude. The pilot tried to make an emergency landing, but with snow on the ground he could not judge the terrain. The plane hit a low hill, crossed a ravine and came down in a farm field, where it burned. The page does not name the pilot or his passenger and cites no sources. The 1963 reports say nothing of a landing attempt, only that the plane pancaked into the earth on the Hayden ranch and was partly burned.
The page also tells of the visit itself. The landowner confirmed the place where he had found wreckage the morning after the crash and shared photographs he had taken in 1963. All the wreckage has since been removed, and no pieces show on the surface. The page does not name the landowner, but it credits the photographs to Hans Hayden, probably Ben Hayden's son Hans, who with his brother Twain farmed the old Hayden homestead at Crystal.
On this site: the Stories entry on the two crashes; the Hayden family; the Crystal area history; and the 1950 crash, when a Pocatello flight instructor and two students died near Rattlesnake Creek.