Plane Crash

28 Dartmouth Medicine Winter 2000

Unforgiving Forests

Microbiologist Philip Nice, facing the camera, was

one of numerous Dartmouth College and Dartmouth

Medical School faculty members and students who

took to the woods in the wake of a 1959 plane crash

in an effort to find the downed plane’s pilot and pas-

senger—both of whom were members of the DMS faculty.

DARTMOUTH COLLEGE ARCHIVES

Dartmouth Medicine 29Winter 2000

s freezing rain and dense fog enveloped

the Upper Connecticut River Valley on

the morning of December 24, 1996, a

Learjet ﬂown by two Connecticut-based pilots re-

quested clearance to land at the Lebanon, N.H.,

Airport. Partway into their instrument approach

through the storm, the pilots aborted the landing

and regained altitude for a second try. Moments lat-

er, the Learjet disappeared from the control tower’s

radar screens.

The ensuing air and ground search involved

hundreds of volunteers, including several Dart-

mouth medical student members of the Upper Val-

ley Wilderness Response Team. More than a dozen

Army helicopters were committed to the effort.

Scuba divers scoured the depths of several lakes.

Debate raged over how far the plane might have

traveled before it crashed. When all reasonable

hope of the pilots’ survival was gone, and addition-

al snow accumulation made it unlikely that the

sleek jet would be discovered before the spring

thaw, the official search was suspended. Still, scat-

tered groups of volunteers and members of the pi-

lots’ families continued to search the region’s heav-

ily wooded hillsides for many months afterward.

ne reason so many Upper Valley resi-

dents refused to abandon the search for

the two young pilots from Connecticut

was the still-vivid memory of an equally puzzling

airplane crash in 1959. That crash devastated the

then-small Dartmouth Medical School communi-

ty, for its pilot and passenger were both members of

the DMS faculty.

Ralph Miller, M.D., was chair of pathology, di-

rector of the laboratories at Mary Hitchcock

Memorial Hospital, and a senior consultant in

pathology for the Veterans Administration Hospi-

tal in White River Junction, Vt. A graduate of both

Dartmouth College and the Medical School, he’d

been on the faculty at DMS since 1931, after com-

pleting his M.D. at Harvard, a year of internship at

Mary Hitchcock, and a fellowship in pathology at

the Mayo Foundation. In 1959, at 60 years of age,

he was at the peak of his career.

When he wasn’t teaching medical students or

performing autopsies, Miller was doing something

In 1959, two

members of the

Dartmouth Medical

School faculty set

out in a small plane

on a medical

mission to northern

New Hampshire.

They never

returned. Four

decades later,

the impact of

their death in the

North Country’s

unforgiving forests

still resonates

through Dartmouth

and the region’s

wilderness rescue

community.

John Morton was head coach of men’s skiing at Dartmouth Col-

lege from 1978 to 1989. He now designs trails for cross-country

running and skiing and writes about the outdoors from his home

in Thetford, Vt. He is also a six-time member as a competitor,

coach, or team leader of the U.S. Olympic biathlon team. This is

not the ﬁrst time Morton has written about harrowing cold-weath-

er exploits for Dartmouth Medicine; his “Drama on Denali”

was the cover feature in the Winter 1999 issue. Among the sources

Morton found especially helpful in researching this story was an

article titled “The Missing Doctors” by Floyd W. Ramsey, pub-

lished in the Winter 1986 issue of Magnetic North magazine.

By John Morton

“Life is either a daring adventure

or nothing at all.”

—Helen Keller

30 Dartmouth Medicine Winter 2000

in the outdoors. He maintained a lifelong connec-

tion with the Dartmouth Outing Club, which he

had joined when he was an undergraduate. His love

of Alpine skiing had inspired his son, Ralph, Jr.,

also a Dartmouth College graduate, to establish the

world speed record on skis in 1955 and to earn a

spot on the 1956 Olympic ski team. Both father

and son were known for their love of the rugged

outdoors and for going fast.

But perhaps Dr. Miller’s greatest joy was ﬂying.

He was an accomplished pilot with more than 20

years of experience in several types of private air-

craft. He had ﬂown two Arctic research expeditions

for Dartmouth and was a charter member of the

Lebanon chapter of the Civil Air Patrol. And it was

not uncommon for him to combine his passion for

ﬂying with his medical work. He frequently trav-

eled in his own plane to medical conferences all

over the country and, in the course of doing au-

topsies around the state, had flown into many a

small airstrip in remote New Hampshire towns.

On the morning of Saturday, February 21, 1959,

Miller agreed to fly his colleague Robert Quinn,

M.D., to Berlin, N.H., north of the White Moun-

tains. Quinn had been asked to consult on a pa-

tient there with serious heart problems, while

Miller himself was already planning to ﬂy north to

do an autopsy in Lancaster, N.H., only 20 miles

from Berlin. Quinn, 32 years old, was a respected

young cardiologist who had been recruited to Dart-

mouth in 1956. After earning his M.D. from Yale,

Quinn had served two years in the Army Medical

Corps and done research at Harvard before joining

the faculty at Dartmouth and the medical staff at

both the Hitchcock Clinic and the White River

Junction VA Hospital.

The weather was not good when Miller’s cream

and red Piper Comanche left Lebanon Airport, but

the weather in northern New England is seldom

ideal for ﬂying—and Quinn was urgently needed at

the Berlin Hospital. Miller had filed a six-hour

round-trip ﬂight plan that on the way back would

bring them over Gorham and Littleton, then down

the Connecticut River to Lebanon. On the out-

bound leg, Miller planned to drop Quinn off in

Berlin to see his cardiac patient, then make a short

hop to an airstrip in Whiteﬁeld, N.H.; from there,

he would travel to nearby Lancaster to perform the

autopsy before ﬂying back to Berlin to pick up his

colleague for the trip home.

ll went according to schedule until Miller

returned to Berlin from Whitefield in

mid-afternoon. The weather was deterio-

rating, and shortly before 3:00 p.m., Dr. Miller can-

celed his original ﬂight plan. The two doctors then

Ralph Miller’s greatest joy was

probably ﬂying. He is pictured at

right ready to go aloft and

above, in August of 1955, with

Dartmouth anthropologist Elmer

Harp; they had just returned

from a two-month expedition to

the Northwest Territories, and

Harp recalls that Miller had

taught him to ﬂy before they left,

so there would be a second pilot

in the plane. When Miller

crashed in 1959, numerous

aircraft—both private and mili-

tary (below)—joined in the

search for his downed plane.

DARTMOUTH COLLEGE ARCHIVESDARTMOUTH COLLEGE ARCHIVES

Dartmouth Medicine 31Winter 2000

went into nearby Milan for a quick lunch, probably

hoping the weather would improve. Sometime

around 3:30, the cream and red Comanche was seen

taking off from the Berlin airport, even though

there were serious snow squalls in the vicinity.

Miller hadn’t submitted a revised flight plan yet,

but the airport official who saw him depart assumed

he’d ﬁle one by radio.

Although he had 20 years’ experience as a pilot,

Miller had had only eight hours of instrument train-

ing, so he generally ﬂew low enough to follow the

highways. His plane was identiﬁed over Route 2 in

Jefferson at 3:35 p.m. At roughly the same time, an

Army pilot ﬂying high overhead in the clouds heard

Miller twice try to radio the Whitefield Airport.

According to the Army pilot, there was no response

from Whitefield. No further sightings or reports

were ever conﬁrmed.

At 9:00 p.m. that same night, Modestino Cris-

citiello, M.D.—a close friend of the Quinns and,

like the young cardiologist, a 1956 addition to the

Clinic staff and the DMS faculty—informed the

Civil Aeronautics Authority that the two physi-

cians had not returned as expected. Despite sub-

zero temperatures and continued snow squalls, a

search was launched before dawn on Sunday morn-

ing. It quickly became one of the most extensive

searches in the state’s history, covering hundreds of

square miles from Vermont in the west, to Maine in

the east, and as far south as Keene, N.H.

Although the air search was hampered by sev-

eral days of bad weather, it eventually involved the

Civil Air Patrol, the National Guard, the Army,

and the Air Force, as well as dozens of private

planes. February 25—four days after the doctors’

disappearance—brought the ﬁrst really good weath-

er for aerial surveillance; that day, 70 aircraft criss-

crossed northern New Hampshire. More than 260

suspected sightings had been reported and were in-

vestigated, but none turned up the missing Co-

manche. The intensive air search, which included

both ﬁxed-wing planes and helicopters, continued

for several more days. Before the Air Force with-

drew from the effort in early March, its pilots alone

had contributed nearly 450 sorties, 700 hours of ﬂy-

ing time, and 5,000 gallons of fuel.

Meanwhile, a massive ground search was also

under way, covering some of the wildest terrain in

the Northeast. Soldiers from the National Guard,

state police officers, and conservation officers from

the Department of Fish and Game were joined by

numerous faculty members and students from both

the Medical School and the College, including

many members of the Dartmouth Outing Club. The

Dartmouth-based searchers were inspired by the

tireless efforts of Philip Nice, M.D., a pathology de-

partment colleague of Miller’s, and by Ralph Miller,

Jr., the pilot’s son, who at the time of the accident

was a second-year medical student at Dartmouth.

But in spite of heroic efforts by hundreds of volun-

teers, who endured extended exposure to severe

winter conditions, hope that the doctors would be

found alive began to fade as the days passed.

“Even if [the doctors] escaped death when their

plane went down,” reported the local Valley News

on February 26, “it is doubtful if they could resist

ﬁve nights with temperatures as low as 30 degrees

below zero.” On March 1, eight days after the

plane’s disappearance, the official search was halt-

ed. Added to the dwindling hope of a successful res-

cue was fear of possible casualties among the ground

searchers, since even daytime temperatures were

below zero. Still, sporadic search efforts continued,

including occasional air sorties financed by the

Medical School and Mary Hitchcock Hospital.

March and April passed, without any sign of the

missing plane. “Searchers puzzled,” said one news-

paper headline, while the accompanying story read,

“The grim question is ‘How can the wreckage of an

airplane remain undiscovered with so many planes

and searchers probing the area?’”

inally, on Tuesday, May 5, more than two

months after the accident, a private plane—

chartered by Dartmouth, piloted by Richard

Stone, and carrying as observer a New Hampshire

conservation officer named Richard Melendy—was

searching the Pemigewasset Wilderness, located

east of the impressive Franconia Ridge. The “Pemi,”

as it is known to hiking and camping enthusiasts, is

the large, uninhabited interior of the White Moun-

tain National Forest. Logging operations there in

the 1800s had left a network of overgrown skid

roads and an abandoned railroad bed once used to

extract millions of board-feet of timber.

To day, the southern boundary of the Pemige-

wasset is marked by the popular Kancamagus High-

way, which bisects the White Mountain National

Forest from Lincoln to Conway. But in 1959, the

Kancamagus was still on the drawing boards, and

the heart of the Pemi was about as far from a paved

road as one could get in New Hampshire.

At about 4:00 p.m. on May 5, Officer Melendy

spotted the wreckage of a small plane across the

Thoreau Falls Trail, at nearly the geographical cen-

ter of the Pemi. Stone ﬂew back to his base and re-

ported the sighting to John Rand, executive direc-

tor of the Dartmouth Outing Club. By 4:00 a.m.

the next morning, a search party had been mobi-

lized. It was led by Miller’s colleague Phil Nice and

included his son, Ralph, Jr.; Stone; Melendy; and

two other conservation officers familiar with the

It was not

uncommon for

Miller to combine

his passion for

ﬂying with his

medical work.

Miller (above) had been a mem-

ber of the DMS faculty since

1931, while Quinn (below) had

come to Hanover only three

years before the 1959 crash.

DARTMOUTH COLLEGE ARCHIVES DARTMOUTH COLLEGE ARCHIVES

32 Dartmouth Medicine Winter 2000

White Mountains. They found the trek slow going,

through patches of deep, soft snow and streams that

were brimming with spring runoff. A mile from the

crash site, one member of the search party discov-

ered an unusual knife in the snow. Ralph Miller, Jr.,

identiﬁed the instrument as a surgical scalpel iden-

tical to those used by his father. It was the ﬁrst in-

dication the searchers had that the doctors had sur-

vived the crash.

Farther on, the wreckage was sighted. The plane

was upside down, partially supported by birch

saplings, its crumpled left wing overhanging the

trail. Dr. Miller’s body was found under the wing.

He was wearing a winter jacket and boots. About

200 feet from the aircraft lay Quinn’s body. He wore

only street clothes and was missing his shoes, which

were never found. Miller’s jaw had been badly bro-

ken in the crash, but Quinn appeared to be unin-

jured. Near the bodies, hanging from birch saplings,

were two sets of crude snowshoes; they had been

cannily crafted from branches and surgical tape,

with bindings made of Ace bandages and adhesive

plaster. Under the left wing of the airplane, near

Dr. Miller’s body, was a neat pile of ﬁrewood that

had been cut with a surgical saw. Nearby were the

remnants of a signal ﬁre that, sadly, had never been

seen from the air.

But the most poignant discovery was a plastic

bottle found in the cockpit of the plane; a line care-

fully inscribed two inches up from the base was

marked “CUT HERE.” Inside, the searchers found

what amounted to a journal of the two doctors’

struggle to stay alive in the four days following the

crash. On Monday, February 23, Doctor Miller had

written:

“When carb ice set us down here Saturday about

4:30 we made camp. Fair night. -5˚ F. Good wood

cut with hacksaw.

“Sunday noon we went south on snowshoes

(home made) but the road petered out and we re-

turned with enough energy to secure wood for the

night. Again fairly comfortable.

“It is +5 this morning but reached -10 last night.

“It is cloudy and I see little prospect of any

planes reaching us today.

“We will go north with the chance this aban-

doned rail road leads somewhere. My charts do not

give enough details to be sure where we are. Should

we not return, regrets to all. We will keep trying to

our limit.

“The ice formed so fast on the carb heat control

it would not come on. This because I was throttled

down so the engine heat was not up to standard

200˚.

“It was the ﬁrst time I have had any icing with

N5324P.”

One reason the crash site eluded

discovery so long is that it was

located well off the original ﬂight

plan Miller had ﬁled for the re-

turn trip (above). It wasn’t until

May that the plane was found

(right), in the heart of the White

Mountain National Forest. Below,

Ralph Miller, Jr., is pictured hold-

ing his father’s ﬁnal message,

which was written in crayon on

the fabric of the plane’s seat.

Berlin

Gorham

Milan

▲

✹✹

Hanover

Lyme

City or town

Peak over

3,000 feet

Original

ﬂight plan

Crash site

Lincoln

WHITE MTN

NATIONAL

FOREST

Conway

Smarts Mt

Mt Moosilauke

Franconia

Notch

Connecticut

Mt Washington

Pemigewasset

Wilderness

DETAIL

AREA

Jefferson

Lancaster

Littleton

Whiteﬁeld

VERMONT

MAINE

NEW HAMPSHIRE

Lebanon

River

DARTMOUTH COLLEGE ARCHIVESDARTMOUTH COLLEGE ARCHIVES

Dartmouth Medicine 33Winter 2000

Later that same morning, he wrote:

“Monday 10 AM—snowing—decided against

any snoeshoing [sic]. All energy used for wood cut-

ting—I have little hope—good bye Betty—it has

all been wonderful—No regrets except for Bob.

Have fun.”

That same day, Quinn wrote:

“Up until today we were hopeful of being found,

but no signs of rescue ship.

“Tried to walk out yesterday. No luck. I have be-

come particularly weak. Fighting the cold is hard.”

The next day, Miller wrote:

“Tuesday noon

“Still trying—though tools broken. Snow

“No hope left.”

On Wednesday, Miller—evidencing the spirit of

a physician-scientist to the end—scrawled in cray-

on on the fabric of the plane’s seat:

“My last and most important message!! Survival

instinct fights pain. R.E.M. Goodbye all. This is

saving a lot of experiments I hope.”

or Ralph Miller, Jr., today a physician in Lex-

ington, Ky., the 41 years since his father’s

death have not dulled the tragic ironies of

the accident. The night before the ill-fated ﬂight,

father and son had had a spirited conversation

about the weather. Dr. Miller felt the most severe

storms of the winter were over, while his son argued

conﬁdently that more storms and signiﬁcant snow-

falls were still on the way. They bet a bottle of wine

on their predictions.

The next day, shortly before Miller and Quinn

made their ﬁnal departure from Berlin, young Ralph

Miller was enjoying a few runs at the Dartmouth

Skiway with Nice. Both noticed the cold, windy

weather, punctuated by harsh snow squalls that

dumped an accumulation of new coverage.

In retrospect, Ralph, Jr., sees his father’s acci-

dent as an unfortunate series of relatively minor

misjudgments—none of them serious individually,

but, in succession, tragically fatal. Although the

weather was threatening the night before the ﬂight,

Dr. Miller was a man who enjoyed calculated risks,

and challenging weather was simply part of ﬂying in

northern New England. But he also believed in be-

ing prepared; a veteran of two ﬂying expeditions in

the Arctic, Miller owned a comprehensive winter

survival kit that he often carried in his plane. Un-

fortunately, however, the kit had been removed

from the airplane for a previous ﬂight south and had

never been replaced.

Miller’s son also remembers that the Comanche

left Lebanon with less than full fuel tanks; again,

this was not a serious oversight by itself, but it

turned out that the plane couldn’t be refueled in

either Whiteﬁeld or Berlin. That meant there was

just enough—but none too much—fuel for the re-

turn ﬂight. Finally, when the plane left Berlin for

the return flight, Miller could have climbed up

through the snow squalls, but he apparently felt

more comfortable staying below the clouds so he

could maintain visual contact with terrain that he

recognized. As the ceiling lowered, however, that

meant the option of returning to Berlin became im-

possible, since the narrow valley between Gorham

and Jefferson was too tight for a turn.

Low on fuel and probably blinded by the swirling

snow, Miller dropped the Comanche’s landing gear

and applied full flaps to reduce its airspeed as he

brought the airplane down in the midst of the Pemi.

It will never be known exactly what downed them,

but Miller’s poise and experience clearly avoided a

catastrophic impact with the ground. The fact that

both doctors survived the crash with minimal in-

juries is a tribute to his ability to handle a plane un-

der extreme conditions.

Sadly, once the doctors were on the ground, the

ironies continued to mount. The Comanche’s radio

had not been damaged in the crash, but the

wrecked plane was surrounded by 4,000-foot ridges

that effectively blocked any distant radio transmis-

sions. Nevertheless, had the weather cooperated,

Miller almost certainly would have been able to ra-

dio any planes flying overhead—but the winter

storms that he’d bet his son were over kept search

planes out of the skies until Wednesday, the day the

doctors ﬁnally succumbed to the cold.

A ﬁnal tragic misjudgment, for which the doc-

tors cannot be blamed, involves their decision to

abort the effort to walk out from the crash site. Af-

ter their ingenious attempt to fabricate snowshoes

from the materials they had at hand, they followed

the abandoned logging railroad bed more than a

mile from the airplane. Given the severe cold and

the deep snow, it is unlikely that they could have

managed the 12-mile hike to the town of Lincoln,

but less than a mile from the point where Dr.

Miller’s scalpel was found, a Forest Service cabin

overlooks the logging trail. Although they had no

way of knowing it, the two doctors were a mere

eight-tenths of a mile from food and shelter that

would have allowed them to survive well beyond

Wednesday, when the air search began.

alph Miller, Jr., acknowledges that his fa-

ther thrived on taking calculated risks. Dr.

Miller enjoyed reading accounts of the

Arctic and Antarctic explorations of Peary, Shack-

leton, and Byrd. And because his chosen ﬁeld with-

in medicine brought him into contact with death

almost daily, dying was for him not a terrifying

The night before

the ill-fated ﬂight,

Dr. Miller and

his son had

had a spirited

conversation about

the weather.

Found at the crash site were two

pairs of handmade snowshoes

hanging on saplings (above) and

notes from the doctors (below,

a closeup of Miller’s last note).

DARTMOUTH COLLEGE ARCHIVES DARTMOUTH COLLEGE ARCHIVES

34 Dartmouth Medicine Winter 2000

philosophical concept but, instead, an inevitable

part of living. His journal entries during the ﬁnal

four days suggest an objective, scientific detach-

ment, rather than any sense of fear or desperation.

His only stated regret was for his young colleague.

The search was also full of tragic ironies. Phil

Nice has reﬂected many times since 1959 on the

unsuccessful, though not completely misguided, ef-

fort. “In my opinion,” he says, “the largest mistake

was a lack of a high-flying night search on the

22nd,” during a break in the bad weather. After the

plane was discovered, he adds, “we realized they did

have a ﬁre going that might have been seen.” Nice

says an experienced pilot based in Lebanon put in

an urgent request to the military for a night search

on the 22nd. But “the officer who was to be in

charge of the ﬂights did not arrive until afternoon

because of engine trouble,” explains Nice.

In addition, although there was a massive mo-

bilization of resources during the week following

the doctors’ disappearance, the operation lacked

cohesion. “The search efforts were intense, but

chaotic,” says Nice, “due to too many units trying

to be helpful, with no central organization to coor-

dinate efforts.”

Nice also rues the fact that “there was a sense of

pessimism on the part of some ‘experts,’ who were

assuming that it would not be possible to survive a

crash in the winter in New England. Those of us

who knew Ralph Miller were more optimistic. . . .

He was a knowledgeable outdoor person with good

survival skills. The snowshoes he made the first

night are evidence of that.” But without a coordi-

nated search effort, that conﬁdence couldn’t be re-

ported and acted upon.

Finally, so many well-intentioned but erroneous

sightings were reported that Nice believes it seri-

ously diluted the search effort—stretching it far be-

yond the realistic location of the downed plane.

lthough the loss of Ralph Miller and

Robert Quinn was a devastating blow to

their families and a shock to the Dart-

mouth medical community, the last four decades

have brought about changes that would have

pleased the two men. The Rare Book Room at

DMS’s Dana Biomedical Library was named in Dr.

Quinn’s memory. And a Medical School lecture se-

ries was established in Dr. Miller’s name. The Dart-

mouth Outing Club also paid tribute to the two

men, by building the Miller-Quinn Airstrip in the

College Grant to provide safe haven for other small

planes that might be caught in similar circum-

stances over New Hampshire’s north woods.

And their deaths were not in vain. “The inci-

dent galvanized the community and began a tradi-

Although an extensive search

(above) was mounted after the

plane disappeared, the effort

was hampered by communica-

tions that were rudimentary by

today’s standards (right) and by

the fact that there was little coor-

dination among all the individu-

als and organizations (including

several branches of the military,

below) that were involved.

ALL: DARTMOUTH COLLEGE ARCHIVES

Dartmouth Medicine 35Winter 2000

tion of wilderness search and rescue” that is today

stronger than ever, according to current DMS stu-

dent Timothy Burdick, who is the volunteer med-

ical officer for the Upper Valley Wilderness Re-

sponse Team.

In addition, the doctors would no doubt be

proud that both had a son who carried on their

medical legacy. Ralph Miller, Jr., M.D., is an in-

ternist and endocrinologist at the University of

Kentucky Medical Center, and Geoffrey Quinn,

M.D., who was three years old when his father died,

is a general internist in California.

Dr. Miller especially would also be intrigued by

advancements in search and rescue capabilities

since 1959. Lieutenant David Hewitt, a New

Hampshire conservation officer who played a cen-

tral role in the effort to ﬁnd the missing Learjet,

says there have been many technological improve-

ments over the past four decades.

Following the disappearance of the Learjet from

Lebanon’s radar, the New Hampshire Department

of Fish and Game, which has responsibility for or-

ganizing searches in the state, had immediate access

to the Federal Aviation Agency’s radar records and

to taped transmissions of the aircraft’s radio com-

munications. The search for the Learjet was un-

derway within an hour, using snowmobiles and all-

terrain vehicles.

As the 1990s drew to a close, searchers also had

access to high-tech instruments that enhanced the

range of their eyes and ears. Computer-generated

topographical maps and global positioning system

devices allowed search teams looking for the Con-

necticut pilots to precisely identify what ground

had been covered and where to look next. Cellular

telephones and small, portable radios allowed

search parties to easily stay in contact with each

other and with the command center. Of the 14 he-

licopters provided by the military, some were

equipped with infrared radar, capable of locating

sources of heat on the ground, even at night. Mili-

tary satellites were also pulled into the Learjet

search, and intelligence analysts suggested sites that

might have concealed the wreckage.

To day there are also far more people in the

woods, even in wintertime, than there were in

1959—hiking, snowshoeing, cross-country skiing,

and snowmobiling. Though still not densely popu-

lated, the northern part of the state is now criss-

crossed by trails that didn’t exist four decades ago.

In addition, several teams of search dogs, capable of

picking up the scent of a human from half a mile

away, were pressed into service in the search for the

downed Learjet.

Perhaps two advancements would have held

special signiﬁcance for Dr. Miller. A technological

marvel that would have made all the difference in

1959 is the Emergency Locator Transponder. This

device is automatically activated in an emergency

and emits a powerful radio signal that allows au-

thorities to pinpoint the location of a downed air-

craft within minutes. ELTs are currently required

on all piston-driven aircraft (like Miller’s Piper Co-

manche), though they are still optional on turbine-

powered aircraft (like the Learjet). Had the ill-fat-

ed Learjet been equipped with an ELT, Civil Air

Patrol officials theorize that the crash site would

have been located within an hour.

The second signiﬁcant advancement has been

organizational. Four decades after losing his mentor

and friend in the 1959 crash, Phil Nice still voices

frustration about the disorganization and fragmen-

tation of the critical, preliminary search efforts.

There were several state and federal agencies in-

volved, as well as many volunteer organizations, but

there was no clear operational leader. As a result,

there was much duplication of effort.

To day, letters of agreement exist among the var-

ious emergency response agencies, clearly deﬁning

an “incident command system,” which assigns areas

of responsibility, describes points of contact and co-

operation among agencies, and even provides a

common language to be used during an emergency.

An observer at the command center of the search

for the Learjet would have seen a much more orga-

nized and systematic interagency approach than

Nice experienced in 1959.

et all of these technological and organiza-

tional improvements were not what ﬁnal-

ly led searchers to the missing Learjet. It

was a forester—engaged in a routine timber-stand

evaluation, almost three years after the accident—

who ﬁnally came across the plane. It was located

on a remote shoulder of Smarts Mountain in Lyme,

N.H., about as far from a road as it’s possible to get

within the Upper Valley. The pilots, it was clear,

had died on impact. And the crash site had been

completely camouﬂaged by treetops; even when the

jet’s exact location was pinpointed on aerial photos

taken after the crash, no trace of the wreckage was

visible. Lieutenant Hewitt pointed out in a press

conference after the plane’s discovery that 2,800

square miles—the presumed search area for the

Learjet—of predominantly forested wilderness is a

huge expanse to cover methodically, whether on

foot or by air.

So although much has changed since Miller and

Quinn wagered with the weather 41 years ago,

much remains the same. Mother Nature and the

mountainous northern forests are every bit as un-

forgiving today as they were four decades ago.

■

Mother Nature and

the mountainous

northern forests are

every bit as

unforgiving today

as they were four

decades ago.

Dartmouth was instrumental in

the search, at the individual

(above) and organizational levels

(below, with the Dartmouth Out-

ing Club’s John Rand at right).