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LibrizziMrs. Charlotte Morgan of Beach Hoad in Hinsdale led the search yesterday for the tuo crash survivors. Her house uas the first that pilot Robert Breen came to after a hike in the woods. Mrs. Morgan later led volunteers to the site of the wrecked Riper Cherokee. She gave her coat to one of the men when she found the plane. Behind her is the Air National Cuard helicopter which took Hr. Hans Baseh to the scene in U ashington.Passenger Interviewed At HospitalBy LISA LANSING“ ‘We’ll go under the snow,' the pilot said. But then everything happened so fast. We were lucky.” Army Pvt. Alex Mazika lay in a bed at Pittsfield General Hospital remembering what happened to him, another GI, George McNamee, and pilot Robert Breen. 25, on October Mountain Sunday evening.The two 20-year-old Gls were rushed to Pittsfield General Hospital yesterday noon after a morning-long search through the tangled underbrush on the mountainside for the wreckage of the small plane. Both were reported in good condition this i morning. Mazika suffered a broken rib and a neck sprain; McNamee has a concussion and head and face lacerations.To Ft. DevensBoth men will be transported tomorrow to the military hospital at Ft. Devens by an ambulance to be dispatched from the Army base at 8 a m.Breen was reported in fair condition this morning at St. Luke’s hospital. He has extensive head and face injuries and ! has suffered a concussion. According to hospital officials, he ( is ‘‘resting comfortably after a , good night.”! The Piper Cherokee. 4180 mo-, del. crashed in a dense thicket f on the mountain range’s east slope.“My seat belt ripped my clothes apart,” Mazika said this morning. ‘‘1 still have marks on my stomach.” He and the other two, he estimates, were saved by the belts.He recalled just before the crash that Breen had been fighting through heavy snow flurries and had tried to fly beneath the weather.Night Was ColdThe night spent in the plane was cold; the temperatures [ were below freezing. McNamee ^ was partly unconscious and delirious during the night and Ma- zika was worried that all three of ' them would be frostbitten.‘‘We kept moving our feeting the night and that winds had been strong.Three investigators from the FAA and the CAB were in the Berkshires yesterday viewing the wreckage of the plane and talking with Breen. The group today flew to Providence, where they will talk w’ith Larsen. An official report, according to Steven J. Bistran, FAA agent in Westfield, will probably be released soon.Mazika and McNamee were flying to Ft. Drum in Water-town, N.Y., when the crash occurred. Their unit, based at Ft. Devens, was on manuvers in north New York State. The small plane took off from the Providence airport in North Smithfield at 7 p.m. and was reported overdue in Watertown at 9:45 p.m. An alert was flashed that night to airports along thecourse of the flight.The volunteer search through the dense October Mountain woods did not start until about 8 a.m. yesterday, after pilot Breen hiked about three miles northwest through the woods to the home of Mrs. Charlotte Morgan of Beach Road in Hinsdale She telephoned state police from the home of Thomas Ar-modie and drove Breen to St. Luke's Hospital.The irony of Breen's three-mile walk was that the back pasture of Carl A. R. Simon’s house on Stonehouse Road was lets than 1,00(1 \urds to the southeast of the wrecked plane.When Mazika and McNamee were evacuated yesterday noon by teams of volunteers, they were carried on stretchers to the pasture and then driven to the hospital in a Civil Air Parol ambulance.
Newspaper Details
The Berkshire Eagle
Pittsfield, Massachusetts, US
Tue, Apr 12, 1966
Page 13
Full Page
Clipped by
Lenox L.
MA, USA 13 Dec 2023
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