Archeologists Search High for Air Disaster Clues : Aviation: Club members go through archives and comb sites to learn the drama and details of crashes.

When Hank Peterson and Doug Wyman were teen-agers in 1954, they were spellbound by the news of a spectacular airplane crash, the stuff movies are made of.

It took 45 hours to find the wreckage of the Northeast Airlines DC-3 in the mountains of New Hampshire that winter. There was death and survival, a heroic flight attendant, a cryptic radio message and a dramatic rescue by helicopter.

Thirty years later, the two set out on what became a painstaking search for the crash site.

Thus was born the Aviation Archaeology Club of New Hampshire, one of only a few such clubs in the country.

Aviation archeologists can be motivated by goals as lofty as looking for history or as mundane as escaping weekend yard chores.

Lawrence Webster, 47, of Shannock, R.I., a mechanical design engineer who calls himself “an aviation archeologist-lunatic,” says New England has a smattering of such groups, some more formal than others. New Jersey, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado and California all have a few groups and individuals who search for plane wreckage, he said.

“Some like to restore antique planes, others just like the recreation part of it,” Webster said. Formal organizations are rare, though, he said. “The air museums and the industry like to avoid us because we’re a reminder that people die when airplanes crash.”

Webster has extensive computer files of New England crashes going back to the 1908 crash of “an airship,” probably a balloon, at a fair in Waterville, Me. The operator, C.O. Jones, was killed. His records indicate that the first airplane flight in New England produced the region’s first crash, “a hard landing on ice” in Essex, Mass.

Webster, who also belongs to several Rhode Island and Connecticut aviation groups, is concentrating on restoring a World War II Navy Grumman Hellcat fighter that crashed off Martha’s Vineyard in 1945 and was retrieved from the Atlantic last year.

One of the few organized clubs is the Maine Aviation Historical Society, a nonprofit group whose objective is to chronicle “anything dealing with Maine and aviation, from postcards to restored airplanes,” said Leo Boyle, president of the society.

For years, Boyle of Westbrook, Me., has searched for evidence of L’Oiseau Blanc, the White Bird, a seaplane two Frenchmen set out to fly across the Atlantic from Paris to New York a few weeks before Charles Lindbergh made his historic New York-to-Paris solo flight in 1927.

Boyle, 67, is convinced that the legendary plane, which Lindbergh himself called the “White Ghost,” crashed in the mountains of Maine.

Peterson and Wyman have a less scholarly bent. Their fascination with the 1954 DC-3 crash 13 miles from the Berlin airport was rekindled periodically.

“ ‘My God, it’s still there!’ ” Peterson recalls telling Wyman once after seeing a picture of the wreckage in a newspaper anniversary story.

The plane crashed just below the summit of 3,570-foot Mt. Success. “ ‘Another 100 feet and they would have made it,’ ” Wyman said. Two of the seven people aboard were killed; a flight attendant heroically tended to the wounded.

The two resolved to act one day in the early 1980s as they were returning home to Concord from a hike in the White Mountains.

“ ‘Remember that DC-3 crash when we were kids on Mt. Success?,’ ” Wyman, 54, recalls asking. “ ‘Let’s go find it.’ ”

Wyman, a police lieutenant at the time, spent days at the state library and state archives doing research. “It took us three or four trips and we couldn’t find it,” he said, although the wreckage was only 100 yards from a hiking trail.

Determined, they kept searching. Finally, with the help of a game warden, they found what they were looking for in 1982.

Of the 31 serious crashes in New Hampshire recorded in various state and federal archives since the mid-1940s, the club’s members have visited and inspected 18.

“We don’t bother with the accidents that were little more severe than rough landings in cow pastures,” said Nick Wallner, 47, head of a travel agency branch in Concord and the club’s historian and chief researcher.

The club’s work is recognized and cited by the state Aeronautics Commission. The four members (a fifth died last year) carry a letter from the agency asking landowners to allow them access.

“I think they have a wonderful time and are very helpful to us,” said Rick Bolin, a commission inspector. Bolin said information the club has collected on crash sites has helped planes making air-to-ground searches ignore wreckage from previous crashes.

Club members can describe details not only about the planes, but their pilots and passengers, their occupations, destinations, who was drunk or off-course, whose flying license had been suspended, which plane was stolen.

They can tell a heart-rending story of three men who died on Mt. Kearsarge after their plane crashed on Aug. 19, 1960. The pilot was found in the wreck; a second victim was found 70 feet away.

The third, Oliver Newcomb, was found along a brook more than a mile away. He had fashioned a small flag from his shirt to mark the spot and left a farewell message to his family on the back of a credit card.

Dr. Ralph Miller and Dr. Robert Quinn, whose plane crashed on Feb. 21, 1959, in a snowstorm in Lincoln, survived for four days in subzero weather. They wrote messages on the plane’s upholstery. They tried to get out of the wilderness on makeshift snowshoes and managed to build a campfire before they died.

Even with topographical maps and compasses, finding wrecks can be difficult.

One of the most frustrating searches was in Waterville Valley, Wallner said. “We found it literally when I stepped onto the tire. I’ve been back four times and know the exact heading--143 degrees off Jennings Peak--and I haven’t been able to find it again. If you’re off by five yards, you can miss it because the terrain is so overgrown.”

For that reason, the club is trying to get a $400 GPS (global positioning satellite) finder that can find any spot on Earth within 50 feet.

Wallner compares the club’s work to searching for sunken treasure in the ocean, “except that ours is two-dimensional and a lot less expensive.”

Lost treasure is part of the lore of the Parker Mountain crash of an amphibian Grumman in Center Strafford on May 6, 1946, that took the lives of three people, including a Columbus, Ohio, industrialist.

“Supposedly the plane had a box of jewels on it, and when that rumor got out, everybody from Rochester and Center Strafford went up that mountain looking for those jewels,” Wyman said.

“Of course there was no jewel box, which later was found in a safe in a New York City hotel.”