On the night of Thursday, November 2, 1950, a light plane from Pocatello crashed at the upper end of Arbon Valley, near Rattlesnake Creek in the Crystal area, and all three men aboard were killed. Farmers heard it come down, but the wreck was not found until the next morning. The Stories page gives the crash in brief. The Salt Lake papers of November 3 and 4 add what the farmers heard, what the investigators found, and what the weather was doing over the valley that night.
The flight
The plane was a four-seat, single-engine Cessna owned by the Wilson Flying Service of Pocatello. Its pilot, Gene Armstrong, was a commercial flight instructor. According to the Deseret News, he was taking two of his students, Paul Shepherd and Shirley Webster, on a cross-country round trip, "a night training flight to Salt Lake City." The Salt Lake Telegram said it had apparently been a "pleasure flight," because it had not been logged as a commercial flight at the airport. The next day the Deseret News added that the three had left no flight plan.
All three were Pocatello men in their twenties, and all had served in the Second World War. Armstrong had been with the army air forces in the South Pacific. Shepherd, who worked at the Utah Oil Company's distributing plant, had served with the air forces in Iceland and was a graduate of Idaho State College. Webster had been in the navy and was taking flight training under the G.I. Bill. A modern reader may need to know that Shirley Webster was a man: the papers call him Mr. Webster and name his widow.
The papers differ a little on the hour. By the Deseret News the plane left the Wilson Flying Service field at Pocatello shortly after 7:30 p.m.; by the Salt Lake Tribune it left Phillips field, the Pocatello municipal airport, shortly before 8. The Telegram and the Deseret News both say it went down only a few minutes after take-off.
What the farmers heard
The Crystal area is a high basin whose springs feed two main creeks, Midnight and Rattlesnake, as the history of Crystal describes. The Deseret News placed Rattlesnake Creek about eight miles north of Arbon. At about eight o'clock that evening several farmers living near the creek heard "an aircraft in difficulty." One of them, Max Pope, said he heard its motor sputter shortly before eight, and then heard the engine gunned about three seconds before the plane struck the ground. Two other farmers, Leonard Judkins and Ben Hayden, went out to look for it but could not find the wreck in the dark. This Ben Hayden was very likely Ben Lynn Hayden of the Crystal Hayden family, who took over the family farm after his brother Norman died that year.
When the plane did not arrive at Salt Lake, highway patrolmen in Utah and Idaho hunted for it all night, and fifteen to twenty planes joined the search. On Friday morning, after a 55-minute search from the air, Bob Fields, a pilot for the Pocatello Flying Service, spotted the wreck on a slope "in low mountain country at the upper end of Arbon valley." His radio message to the CAA, the federal Civil Aeronautics Administration, at Phillips field was short: "It doesn't look too good." The next day's Deseret News gives the sighting to another pilot, whose name its damaged text prints as Sokolik. The Tribune, in a passage that is hard to read, says Mr. Pope was the first to see the wreckage on the ground. Farmers were at the scene that morning, and deputies of the Power County sheriff's office came out from American Falls. Arbon had been in Power County since 1913.
What the wreck showed
The plane had not burned, but it was demolished. It had struck the side of a slope with such force that the tail was folded to within eight feet of the nose. W. E. Thurman, chief of air communications at Phillips field, said the plane had crashed under full power, judging by how completely it was demolished. The Tribune reported that the impact drove the front of the plane two feet into the plowed ground of a field of winter wheat. It added that the watches the men wore had stopped at about eight o'clock, the hour the farmers heard the crash. The Telegram called the place the Norman Grover farm, while the Tribune called it the Milton Grover farm, and neither says more about the owner.
The papers' explanations turned on the weather. The Telegram reported that a driving rainstorm and fog were tentatively blamed. In a partly garbled passage that names Malad, Crystal and Arbon Valley, the Tribune said the weather had appeared ideal. But, it went on, a belt of mist and rain was moving across the upper end of the valley, and the plane was in that rough air when it went down. On Friday an agent of the CAA's district office found no mechanical defect that could have caused the crash. Investigators gave the probable cause as inability to see, probably because of clouds, and an "exceptionally dark" night. No inquest or later report on the cause has been found.
The families and the news
Armstrong left his father in Portland and a brother in Missoula, Montana. Shepherd left his wife, Mabel, his mother and a brother. Webster left his wife, Rene, his parents at Preston, Idaho, and five brothers and two sisters.
The news went beyond Idaho and Utah. An International News Service item datelined Arbon, November 4, reported the three found dead in a wrecked plane eight miles northeast of Arbon. The New Castle News of New Castle, Pennsylvania, printed it that same day. The papers put the site fifteen to twenty miles from Pocatello, south or southwest of the city in most accounts, though the Tribune printed southeast. Taken together, the accounts place it at the upper end of the valley, in the Crystal area.
On this site: the Stories entry for the 1950 crash, the history of Crystal, and the Hayden family. Thirteen years later, in March 1963, two charter planes were lost in a snow squall, and one came down on the Ben L. Hayden ranch north of Crystal.