My (@MatthewsVolvoSite) comment in the comments section I just now wrote, and I'll just post it here rather than make you hunt the comments for it:
It's a fairly gripping 12 minutes, and very sad, because you're hearing a man's last words (tower coms recordings).
I ran across this several nights ago by COMPLETE COINCIDENCE, it appeared on YouTube autoplay as I was winding down the day, in bed ready for sleep. 100% truth. It just played after I watched a civil aviation crash reconstruction video about a family in southern California, because that video was suggested and... why fight? I like aviation.
So the next one auto started and I just about fell out of bed when I heard "N1254Z"... the callsign I learned by heart as a teen. It was nothing less than astonishing.
This was my uncle's Beechcraft. He owned it for about 24 years (roughly 1981-2005), then sold it to this deceased pilot.
I spent around 30-35 hours flying in it, most often MYF <-> SFH (before it was international, so we had to stop first at Mexicali or Ensenada for papers), and one time MYF -> APA, a two-day trip, and another from APA to a Fort Collins, CO airport when he flew me up to college after a break. How freaking exciting is that? When my uncle owned it, it was hangared in MYF, about 1 mile from his house in San Diego.
My first time going to San Felipe in the Beechcraft we landed at the dirt airstrip just outside of my uncle's friend's neighborhood, pushed the plane almost up to his house, and tied down. That was roughly 1983 or 1984. Sometime right after that, the US's War on Drugs' uh... "friendly diplomacy" forced the Mexican government to shut down unmanaged airstrips, and that was the end of that. From then on out, we'd do a low, tight bank flyby of "Uncle Ray's" house to let him know to pick us up from SFH. He didn't have a phone or city electricity out there (but a big diesel generator to keep the beer cold and the ice cubes frozen). Ray was a retired San Diego cop, great at DIY. Hell of a nice guy who drank so much Black Velvet that his bottles had a pump top, too big to easily pick up to pour. He died around 1996.
His neighborhood was an Anglo place, Playa Blanca, what ultimately became a failed development. I was there just over 2 years ago (drove from Ventura) with my friend and my son, and we stopped at Playa Blanca to see our old stomping grounds, and Ray's house. The house I couldn't find. Everything -- all houses there save an abandoned two -- were rubble, leveled, gone. I'll dig up photos from 2021.
He loved that plane. He named it "Little Buddy", and had his bars' logo (a guy playing a tuba, yes really) painted on the vertical stabilizer. This Debonaire was a standard tail, not the V tail.
He flew VFR exclusively, although his rating at times included IFR after the Beechcraft eventually got IFR equipment during his ownership. I was always tasked with something to help, usually scanning the sky for other planes. He never flew along highway corridors because that where other birds were, what everybody did.
I have a photo from around 1982 of my sister and I getting in the Beechcraft, complete with us wearing "OP" shirts and shorts and pulled-up tube socks. I think it's fair to say I loved that plane as much as my uncle.
My uncle was an excellent pilot, though I had little to judge him with back then, I can see it today clearly. He gave up flying when he sold the Beechcraft. He's an ex-Marine, Vietnam War chopper pilot, and he flew missions in the evacuation of Saigon to offshore US carriers taking in the evacuees.
I had utter, complete trust in his abilities to fly, so much (now, in retrospect) that I won't/haven't up with any hobbyist. Sorry, current or ex US military or commercial pilots only for me. I know of too many small aircraft crashes, personally.
I'll post some photos of the Beechcraft when I get/find them.
- playa-blanca.jpg (364.24 KiB) Viewed 1007 times
My college/post gf at SFH, 1995. The plane in the background landed there one night when the airport was closed, and the employees arrived for work the next morning to find it on the runway, shut off, abandoned. It was certainly a drug plane that had some sort of trouble.
- 2021-01-22-0018 (1).jpeg (86.78 KiB) Viewed 1007 times
- 2021-01-22-0017.jpeg (109.96 KiB) Viewed 1007 times
- My uncle Jim. (Uncle Ray wasn't my or my uncle's uncle. It was just a nickname.)
- 2021-01-17-0073.jpeg (131.41 KiB) Viewed 965 times
- I've mentioned a few times here at MVS about ripping around the Mexican desert in a sand rail when I was young, and this is it (left). VW 1600, frame, wheels, seats... and that's about it. Couldn't have weighed more than 700 lbs. That's me with the compressor tire inflator hose. Cindy Poquita (right) was used more for gentler rides on hard sand and trips into town (~3 miles).
- 2021-02-18-0120.jpeg (161.75 KiB) Viewed 965 times
- 2021-02-10-0088.jpeg (100.22 KiB) Viewed 965 times
- Uncle Ray's house. Can you believe there is nothing left? There is nothing left.
- 2021-02-10-0093.jpeg (169.47 KiB) Viewed 965 times
- 2021-02-04-0013.jpeg (122.77 KiB) Viewed 965 times
- 2021-02-01-0127.jpeg (92.77 KiB) Viewed 965 times
- 2021-02-01-0125.jpeg (206.6 KiB) Viewed 965 times
- 2021-02-01-0124.jpeg (155.48 KiB) Viewed 965 times
- In this photo, Uncle Ray's house was exactly 90 degrees to our right, roughly 200m from the beach.
- 2021-02-01-0123.jpeg (120 KiB) Viewed 965 times
