Fragments of a tragedy: Scattered debris in Sandia Mountain meadow reminder of 1966 Air Force jet crash

SANDIA MOUNTAINS — Thin segments of aluminum, slabs of heavier metal, pieces of Fiberglass and particles of Lucite are scattered through the mountain meadow, just 400 feet from the Sandia Crest Road.

If they were not looking for it, most people would not notice the debris, some of which appear to be nothing more than discarded Doublemint wrappers.

But these scraps are fragments of a tragedy, all that’s left of an Air Force weather reconnaissance jet that crashed into these mountains 57 years ago, taking the lives of two officers.

Sam Beard leaned down and retrieved a sliver of corroded aluminum from the ground.

“The two heaviest parts of a plane are the engines and the landing gear,” he said. “Nearly everything else is aluminum.”

Beard, 86, is a retired mechanical engineer who worked at Sandia National Laboratories from 1965 to 2003.

A member of the New Mexico Cross-country Ski Club, New Mexico Volunteers for the Outdoors and Friends of the Sandia Mountains, Beard knows the Sandias about as well as anyone. Early in the afternoon this past Friday, he guided two companions through the crash site.

“The plane was flying this way,” he said, indicating an east-to-west direction. “It hit the trees first. Some of these Engelmann spruces are 100-feet tall. Then the plane fell to the ground and started a fire. This used to be dense forest, but the fire killed the trees and it became a meadow.”

Emergency call

Compiling information from several sources and adding to it himself, Beard has put together a list of 16 plane crashes in the Sandias. The dates are unknown for two of the crashes in this tally, but those that are established range from July 18, 1937, to Nov. 16, 2015.

“Every eight years, on average, a plane crashes in the Sandias,” said Beard, who has visited many of the crash sites.

Beard’s list of crashes adds up to more than 50 fatalities. The incident most people know about is the TWA Flight 260 crash on Feb. 19, 1955, which took the lives of 16 people.

But the crash that burned out this meadow, a short distance up the Sandia Crest Road from the Ellis Trailhead, happened on Monday, Nov. 7, 1966.

Air Force captains Robert O. Bartlett, 35, the pilot, and Leo R. Otway, 29, the navigator, were returning to Kirtland Air Force Base from a routine training mission in a RB-57F weather reconnaissance jet, a $3.5 million aircraft equipped to test for radioactivity in the air during nuclear tests.

The plane, part of the 58th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, was flying back to the base at night and visibility was further limited by a thick, swirling fog and lightly falling snow.

According to The Albuquerque Tribune, “The two-crew jet called in an emergency report to the Kirtland Control tower about 8:45 p.m. and its blip disappeared from the AF West Mesa Radar Station’s radar scope at the same time.”

Because of the poor weather conditions and initial confusion about the approximate location of the crash, it was after midnight before the plane was found.

Smelling smoke

The plane crashed at 10,440 feet, about 300 feet below the mountain’s crest.

A trio consisting of a Bernalillo County Sheriff’s deputy, a Cedar Crest-resident who was a veteran of Sandia Mountain searches and a U.S. Forest Service ranger found the wreckage by following the smell of smoke through the thick fog that cloaked the mountain. A spark falling from a tree tipped them to the exact location.

The plane had sliced its way through trees, leaving stumps in its wake, before landing on its belly. The three men who found it put out several fires in the area, but the deputy reported that the bodies of the two Air Force captains were unburned and lay about three feet in front of the plane.

Bartlett, who lived on Mercury SE, had 1,700 flying hours to his credit and a graduate degree in nuclear engineering from the Armed Forces Institute of Technology. He was survived by his wife, Sigrid, and his parents in Los Angeles.

Otway, who lived on Madeira SE, was a Vietnam veteran with 2,600 flying hours. Prior to his assignment to Kirtland, he had been stationed in Japan, where he met his wife, Yoko. He was survived by his widow and a mother in Michigan.

Somber tribute

In March 1982, when he was 17 years old, David Wade was a member of a Socorro Search and Rescue Team that found a plane that had crashed on a ridgeline southwest of Magdalena, killing 6 people.

“I have felt a connection with victims of plane crashes since then,” said Wade, now 59 and an employee of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “I have really only looked into two military crashes at this point. These are important to me because these people stepped up to serve in the military and knew they were taking great personal risk.”

Wade is a military veteran himself, having served a total of more than 28 years in the active Army, Army Reserve and Army National Guard. He is also a retired Albuquerque Police Department crime-scene investigator, which he thinks is another reason he is interested in crash sites.

He learned about the RB-57F crash when he attended a Sam Beard presentation about Sandia Mountain crashes. He went to the site last month.

“I started finding bits of aluminum as soon as I got in the area of the meadow,” he said. “I found more as I walked. I eventually found pieces of the instrument panels. I had no doubt I was in the right place.

“I knew the direction the plane had come from and imagined what the last moments for the crew could have been like.”

Remembering he had read in the 1966 newspaper stories that the crew radioed an emergency report just before the plane disappeared from radar, Wade was especially moved when he found a part from the radio.

“It struck me that two young men had died on this site, where so many people hike and ski without having any idea why this beautiful meadow is here,” he said. “I found plenty of evidence of the crash. I took photos of some of it and left it all at the site.”

Scraps and shards, bolts and rivets, bits and pieces left behind in somber tribute to two lives lost on a foggy mountain 57 years ago this week.

CORRECTION: This has been corrected to show 6 people died in the crash found by Socorro Search and Rescue Team on a ridgeline southwest of Magdalena.