HALF A CENTURY LATER
Plane crash survivors return to Land O' Lakes

By Joe Costanza
Special to the News-Review

LAND O’ LAKES – A brother and sister who narrowly survived a private plane crash 50 years ago that killed their parents and a cousin returned to the scene of the accident last weekend to thank the people who saved their lives and helped them carry on.

Wesley D. Miner and his sister, Barbara, were 11 and 14 years old, respectively, Aug. 21, 1959, when the plane carrying five family members plunged out of a darkened sky into a wooded area just short of the Land O’ Lakes airport.

Of the five aboard, only Wesley and Barbara survived. Their father, Wesley A. Miner, who was piloting the plane, and their mother were killed instantly and their cousin, Richard Heinrich, who was 18 at the time, never regained consciousness and succumbed to injuries in a Phelps hospital three days later.

According to a Vilas County News-Review article that ran Aug. 27, 1959, the plane was en route to Land O’ Lakes from Elgin, Ill., and had stopped in Rhinelander to refuel. Despite worsening weather, Miner decided to fly on to their vacation home in Land O’ Lakes, a trip they had made many times before without incident.

But on that stormy August night, the single-engine Piper Comanche plane stalled and crashed into the woods a scant 300 feet short of the runway. Barbara and Wesley suffered multiple cuts and bruises and broken bones and were unconscious and in critical condition when taken to Phelps Hospital.

The crash happened at around 8:30 p.m. about 100 yards east of Highway 45. The Land O’ Lakes airport is on the west side of the highway and was reported to be well-lit for night landings.

The article stated, “The plane was twisted and mangled almost beyond recognition with the cockpit and instrument panel a mass of wreckage. The tops of several nearby trees had been clipped off by the plane as it crashed to the ground.”

Wes Miner, now 61, a retired Pfizer Inc. research scientist who has lived in England since 1973, and his sister, now Dr. Barbara Scheffer, 64, of Ann Arbor, Mich., returned to Land O’ Lakes last Saturday to express appreciation to those who gave aid and comfort during their ordeal, and to try to fill in some blanks in what today is mostly blurred memory.

“My sister and I have not been back to the Land O’ Lakes area for almost 50 years and we felt that it was very important for both of us to get back to the area now and to meet as many people as we can who were involved in our care and who came to see us while we were recovering at the Phelps Hospital,” Miner said. “After all these years, we really need to say our thanks and express our gratitude to all the very kind and caring local folk.”

A reception for about 15 people, some of whom remember the tragedy first-hand, was held at Gateway Lodge last Saturday evening. Scheffer put together a montage of old family photos including some taken of her and her brother at Phelps Hospital along with doctors and nurses, and a copy of the News-Review article, as a remembrance. She was accompanied on the trip by her husband, Ken.

With the help of Walt Bates of Land O’ Lakes, a retired United Airlines captain and professional accident investigator who was a student pilot at the time of the crash, Miner and Scheffer have learned some details of the crash which remained a mystery including the crash site, marked now by a red flag in the woods just off Highway 45.

Miner said, “I was interested in finding out more on why the accident occurred. I got in touch with Paul McLeod of the Land O’ Lakes Historical Society, who is good friends with Captain Bates and, working with them, have begun to piece a few things together. We’ve had questions all these years and weren’t clear why the plane crashed. And we never got back to the people who took care of us.”

The brother and sister said they don’t recall much about the accident.

“Fortunately, or unfortunately, I don’t remember a thing,” said Scheffer. “I was told I had retrograde amnesia prior to the accident. I just remember waking up in the hospital.”

Scheffer said she had mixed feelings about returning to the crash site after so many years, but the more she thought about it, the more she felt the need to thank people who helped out and dug into details of the crash. “Walt and the others have been such detectives in this process,” she added.

Miner said he remembers the plane stopping to refuel in Rhinelander and that the sky was cloudy, but it wasn’t raining and that takeoff conditions seemed to be OK. “I vaguely recalled seeing a small town with lights as we flew overhead, but nothing else,” he added.

Bates has since flown over the crash site and taken aerial photos to reconstruct the flight path, and obtained weather charts from 1959.

“There were big trees along the road back then that have since been clear-cut. From all accounts, the weather was terrible. The ceiling was very low, the visibility was very low, and it’s likely that the plane stalled at a high bank angle as the pilot was approaching the runway. He apparently was not able to see the runway until the very last minute and by that time it was too late. Also, the plane was heavily loaded with a full fuel tank and stall speed is the result of how much weight is on the aircraft,” Bates said.

Miner was an experienced pilot and the flight from Rhinelander to Land O’ Lakes normally took about 20 minutes. But on that day, the decision to fly on in the face of deteriorating weather proved to be fatal. Wes Miner said it appears that an inaccurate weather report may have been partly to blame for his father’s decision to keep going.

Miner said Mrs. L. Bennett, who was a flying instructor back in 1959 who still lives in the area, told him she and other pilots at the airport were furious at the time because of the false weather report, which suggested that conditions at Land O’ Lakes were acceptable for landing when actually they were far worse than stated.

Bates said the weather charts showed conditions were rapidly getting worse and that somehow Miner apparently had gotten a hold of a weather report intended for commercial airline use. North Central Airlines at the time flew DC-3s into Land O’ Lakes twice a day.

Bates said the Federal Aviation Administration was established in 1958, and it instituted weather minimums that were in some cases ridiculously high. Before then, pilots had the choice of whether to take off or land.

“All that was taken away from pilots and the airlines chafed at this because they had a money stake. What the airline started doing was to tell the pilot what the weather really is over the radio. As long as it stayed between the airline, management and pilots, it was a fine operation and, quite frankly, there were never really any accidents,” said Bates.

He said what should have happened is that, after the airline’s successful landing, the weather report should have been amended to what it really was.

“Regardless of weather reports and forecasts, it’s always still up to the pilot to decide. I’m the one looking out the window,” said Bates.

First witnesses of the crash rushed from a nearby house to give aid and then summoned help. Miner was in the back seat sandwiched between his sister and cousin and his parents were in the front. Both were bleeding profusely and unconscious, and transported to Phelps Hospital, some 10 miles away. “Some of the people on the scene said I looked like I was dead,” Miner recalled.

One puzzle that remains is why the plane, freshly loaded with fuel, didn’t catch fire.

“The accident ripped off one of the wings, which is where the fuel tanks are, so the place would have been saturated with highly volatile aviation fuel,” said Bates. “You’ve got pieces twisted and mangled, a hot engine and exhaust stacks and you wonder why in the world it didn’t burn. Had there been a fire, these guys never would have made it.”

Miner said he often wonders what life would have been like if they had landed safely or whether he had been in the outside seat instead of his cousin. “It’s funny, but sometimes I think it should have been me,” he said.

As things turned out, he went on to help create important new drugs while working for Pfizer, and Scheffer went on to earn her doctorate degree in education. She has written three books and is a long-time professor in the School of Nursing at Eastern Michigan University.

“I have been very fortunate in my career as a pharmaceutical research scientist, and my sister has a first-class academic reputation in university teaching and research,” Miner said. “If our airplane, which my father was piloting, had remained airborne for an additional 15 to 20 seconds, we probably would have landed safely. What would our lives be like today if we had made it in?”