“Don’t tell my wife about this!”
by Tina Wynecoop This summer I read with interest a report by Jim Camden in The Spokesman Review about a jet plane crash in the Colville National Forest in 1955. His article reminded me of a similar 1955 jet plane crash in the Little Spokane River Valley. I had interviewed life-long local residents Dan Forsyth and Jim Pounder about the event. Here is the account I wrote for our January 2011 FLSRV newsletter under the heading ‘Plane Crash’: I didn’t find a written record of the 1950’s Navy jet trainer plane that crashed into a rocky hillside upslope from the Little Spokane River between Midway and Riverview Roads, The vivid memories of young boys and a twisted piece of metal suffice as proof that it happened. Early one morning c.1954 Jim was awakened from where he slept outside in the family’s sleeping porch, by the sound of a plane coming in low from the east over the little town of Colbert. It crashed near the Hotchkiss place. ‘The jolt felt just like an earthquake.’ The plane’s hydraulics had failed and the pilot bailed out somewhere near Hilltop Road not far from Highway 2. All that was left of the plane was […]