Piper Cherokee Wreckage on Saddleback Mountain

April 10, 2020

On May 28th, 1973, pilot George Delmar left West Haven Vermont on a flight bound for Rutland airport, also in Vermont. Following a previously failed departure from a nearby grassy field, his single engine airplane had suffered wing and propeller damage that he planned to have fixed in Rutland. Bad weather forced him to radio ahead and say he was instead turning for "home" - where Delmar lived in Walpole Massachusetts - but he never arrived and by the next morning a search had begun for his small, yellow and white airplane.

The Burlington Free Press - Wed May 30, 1973

Over the next five days, 25 airplanes and a privately owned helicopter made 113 sorties in an effort to find Delmar's plane, all without success. Because Delmar had not filed a flight plan for his detour, Aeronautics Commissioner Charles Miel said that searchers could not focus on a specific route and therefore were searching "all of southern Vermont". After five days without any leads, the search was called off.

The Burlington Free Press - Mon Jun 4, 1973

It wouldn't be until five months later that a group of hikers from the University of New Hampshire would locate Delmar's crumpled airplane in a "particularly inaccessible spot" of Saddleback Mountain, in the neighboring state of New Hampshire. The students blazed their path back to Route 4 in Northwood and called authorities with the location of the wreck.

The Portsmouth Herald - Tue Oct 23 1973

Delmar was a 25-year old race car driver who had flown to New Haven to participate in weekend races, but having no more than 50 hours of flight experience and holding just a student's pilot license, he wasn't trained in blind flying and therefore unqualified to fly in bad weather, factors that turned fatal when combined with the prior damage done to his aircraft. His body was finally recovered and laid to reset, however, as with many aircraft that have crashed within our mountains, the wreckage of the plane was left in the woods where it fell. Retrieving a body from a location such as this is hard enough in itself - retrieving the entire plane is often just not practical.

45 years after this tragedy we hiked to see Delmar's plane, and it looked much like I imagine it did when it crashed back in 1973. As it was described at the time, this spot is not one you're apt to just stumble across, and being so hidden from the public it seems to have only been touched by nature, not by any misguided souvenir seekers. Unfortunately that does happen at sites like this, but the only disruption here was this pair of trees that had fallen onto the plane.

Although crumpled, one side of the plane was still recognizable for what it used to be. The other side was a shredded pile of metal, and my belief is that this is where it was pried apart to extract Delmar's body. 

A few years had passed when in April of 2020 we made a return hike, and the only thing that seemed to have changed was that the downed trees were a little more rotted. A lot more rotted, in fact, enough to where between the combined muscle of our family we were able to lift them up and toss them aside, a feat that had my teenage daughter feeling pretty good about herself. 

And after cleaning the brush and debris off the plane my wife and I felt pretty good too, in that perhaps we restored just a small amount of dignity to the place that has now become George Delmar's memorial.

* Thank you to our friends at wermudfun for introducing us to this site and for all their extensive research.

* George Delmar, 1972