Despite numerous precautions taken by the owners of the Buena Vista Airfield both Major Dana Crissy and SFC Virgil Thomas were tragically killed in the late afternoon of October 8 1919 while attempting to land their two-seat DH-4 biplane at Salt Lake’s Buena Vista Airfield.
According to the Salt Lake Telegraph newspaper articles, Major Crissy was the ninth aircraft to come into view and a crowd of people were waiting at the Buena Vista Airfield to see the novel “birdmen” and their “birdships.”
Major Crissy and SFC Thomas circled above the crowd and waived greetings; then Major Crissy turned eastbound towards the end of the airfield where he intended to turn the plane and straighten it out for a landing.
About 150 feet in the air the plane swerved sharply and the “great birdship seemed to quiver wounded and then was hurled to the ground in a death crash.” The plane plunged 150 feet nose-first into the ground and crashed into three feet of murky pond water, approximately two hundred yards from the north end of the airfield.
The same newspaper reports that the crowd cried out and then rushed to the shallow pond crash site and attempted to save Major Crissy and SFC Thomas who had become entangled in wires and wreckage.
The crowd attempted to hold the heads of the men above the water so they would not drown while a mechanic from the hangar rushed with pliers to cut the men free of the tangled wires. SFC Thomas was rushed to a local hospital and died enroute and Major Crissy died at the scene of the crash, both from crushed skulls and many broken bones.
Although not the only fatalities of the Transcontinental Air Race, Colonel Henry “Hap” Arnold, in command of the Air Service in the Western states, was a close friend of Major Crissy and requested that the Presidio airfield in California, where Major Crissy had began the Air Race, be renamed after Crissy.
Crissy Field, located at the Presidio in San Francisco California, is now part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
Sources and External Links:
Wikipedia article on Billy Mitchell
Wikipedia article on Henry H. Arnold
Wikipedia article on Crissy Field
Dana Crissy biography from NPS
Dr. William M. Leary, 1984, Billy Mitchell and the Great Transcontinental Air Race of 1919
Salt Lake Telegram 1919-10-09, Storm in Middle West is Menace to Fliers: Two Plunge to Death in Pond
Salt Lake Telegram 1919-10-09, Two Perish in Salt Lake; Eastern Flier Now Leads
Charles S. Davey, The Beginnings of Commercial Aviation, History Blazer, November 1995
CHAPTER 10: 1919...POST-WAR PILOTS TAKE TO THE AIR
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