Fri, Dec 02, 2005
Wreckage Found In September By Construction Crew
An aviation "cold case" has been solved, as skeletal remains
found in the wreckage of a classic Bellanca found in September have
been positively identified.
While news reports of the time had all but confirmed that it was
59-year old Max Weldon Schaeffer and his brother-in-law Eugene
Carlton Goodrow who had gone down with the 1959 Bellanca
Cruisemaster during an ice storm in the mountains of Washington
state in 1983, no one could know for absolute certainty until the
wreckage was found -- which it finally was, 22 years later, by a
Yakima tribal crew installing telecommunications equipment near
Satus Pass.
As was reported last September in
Aero-News, Klickitat County search teams had to wait
for a week before they got permission from the Yakima Nation to
enter the reservation -- but once they did, they found the remains
of two men.
Positive identification of the bodies took some time, but the
victim's names were finally released Wednesday by Klickitat County
Prosecutor-Coroner Timothy S. O'Neill. According to the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer, Schaeffer and Goodrow were the ones onboard the
doomed Bellanca.
The men had taken off from Winthrop, on a trip home from Yakima,
WA to Long Beach, CA on the morning of January 8, 1983. Although
forecasters had warned of icing and severe turbulence through the
pass, the men opted not to wait the storm out on the ground.
Formal release of the names was delayed also so that the men's
families could be notified, according to O'Neill.
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