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Photos by Amy Beth Bennett. The propeller of the plane lies near the trail as hikers make their way to the site of the crash. The blades were retrieved Aug. 4 during an expedition to memorialize victims of the crash that occurred during a secret mission. Steve Peterson, left, and Brenda Cummings cling to each other during a memorial ceremony at the site of the 1955 plane crash at Mount Charleston that killed Cummings' grandfather, Richard Hruda. Joy Cunniff stops to look at a thistle on the side of the trail during a memorial expedition to the site of the 1955 Air Force C-54 transport plane crash near the Mount Charleston peak. Above left, Richard Hruda kneels with his hands on his son, Ken, while his wife, Grayce, sits behind their daughter, Joy, in their yard in Burbank, Calif., in 1951. Dean Charter picks through rocks and debris from the site of the 1955 plane crash. Charter and his wife, Marcia Charter, brought small items that he collected back to Massachusetts and placed them on the grave of her late uncle. Edwin Urolatis is seen holding his 1-month-old nephew, David Urolatis, with 4-year-old niece Marcia (Urolatis) Charter standing at his side. On the back of this photo, Albin Urolatis, Edwin's brother, inscribed a note to his daughter, Marcia. It reads, "Edwin -- your uncle. This picture was taken at our apartment on Howard St. a few months before the airplane crash. He was a big man. I miss him very much." Eric Christensen, member of a committee to establish a monument honoring the plane crash victims, starts down the switchbacks on Mount Charleston's South Loop Trail, carrying down pieces of the exhaust manifold. Click above for enlarged image. Graphic by Mike Johnson.

Sunday, August 19, 2001
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Journey to the Past

Forty-six years after a plane on a military mission crashed on Mount Charleston, family members of some of the 14 who died make a somber trek to the wreckage

For Joy Cunniff, the hike up Mount Charleston was about birthdays and Christmases she never shared with her father.

For her cousin, Steve Peterson, it was about pitch-and-catch he never played with his uncle and the advice on becoming an engineer that he never heard.

Climbing nine miles to a bald, limestone ridge some 11,300 feet above sea level, the families of some of the 14 men killed when their plane slammed into the mountain in 1955 didn't quite know what to expect when they arrived upon what's left of the wreckage.

One purpose of the Aug. 4 daylong expedition to the crash site was to collect keepsakes from the remnants of the C-54 transport plane.

But the trek turned out to mean much more to the families whose lives were changed forever by the doomed flight.

It was about the CIA, the U-2 spy plane and Area 51. It was about the lives of the Cold War's silent heroes and 46 years of being kept in the dark. It was about coming to terms with their loved ones' deaths.

Cunniff was 8 years old when her dad, Richard Hruda, boarded the early morning flight in Burbank, Calif., bound for the secret "Watertown" airstrip along Nevada's dry Groom Lake bed, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Hruda, 37, a Lockheed engineer, was heading out that day to see how the tail that his team had worked long hours to design for the U-2 would perform in a flight test from the place now known as Area 51.

Cunniff, 54, of Paradise, Calif., said she has precious few memories of her father. She remembers that he rarely went on business trips, the family vacations they took to Yosemite and the Tetons, that he often rode his bike to work because the family had only one car. "He liked to hike. He liked to ski. He supported the Olympics," she said, describing the decal of interlocking circles he had placed on the car window.

The Nov. 17, 1955, crash left gaps in the Hruda family history that have taken decades to fill.

"It was very difficult. No one knew what happened. We didn't talk about it a lot," Cunniff said, resting on the rocky trail, halfway up the mountain.

"What I miss most now is the relationship, like the one between my husband and my daughter."

While trudging up the trail at 10,000 feet through a meadow studded with thousand-year-old bristlecone pines, Cunniff became nauseated from the thin air and couldn't complete the last 2 1/2 miles to the crash site.

"I think she was getting closer to something that was tangible, yet not tangible. She has a lot of stuff to work through," another cousin, Las Vegan Larry Peterson, said after the hike.

But Cunniff's daughter, Brenda Cummings, 27, also of Paradise, made it to the site where 30 hikers, some Boy Scouts and a half-dozen cowboys on horseback had hauled tools and supplies to dismantle the plane's last remaining propeller.

Plans call for these blades from the four-engine plane to be reassembled for a visitors center that local scout leader Steve Ririe envisions. He said he hopes efforts of a committee behind his concept will lead to construction of a granite memorial to what he calls the "silent heroes." It will have 14 bronze stars plus a single one on the back that will stand "for all those who have anonymously given their lives in secret projects."

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., proposed legislation last month to provide $300,000 to identify historic Cold War landmarks, like the Mount Charleston crash site.

Standing among the rubble, Cummings became overwhelmed.

"It's incredibly emotional," she said as tears trickled down her face. "I don't know whether it's the wreckage or what happened here. I just wish she (Cunniff) could see it."

In a ceremony that was radioed to the Mount Charleston Lodge for friends and relatives unable to make the 18-mile round-trip trek, Steve Peterson, 44, of Newark, Del., spoke for the Hruda family.

"We've all been experiencing this loss today in a way that really brings it home," he said. "We feel more of a sense of loss and healing than ever before.

"I would have really liked to have known my uncle."

A few steps away, Dean Charter sifted through rocks beneath a pile of metal. He was searching for a stone to put on the grave of his wife's uncle and godfather, Edwin Urolatis, one of the young, athletic CIA security men on the flight. Urolatis, 27, was escorting the team of engineers on their mission at "the ranch" -- another name for the secret test location on Groom Lake.

The spy plane, equipped with long-range cameras, would later play a pivotal role in national security, uncovering where Soviet missiles were based, all while staying in flight at a 70,000-foot-altitude, out of range of MiG fighter jets. The U-2 is still part of the U.S. security network.

"It must have been a horrible night," Charter said, clutching a stone caked with melted aluminum that was handed to him by an expedition member. "I picked up a couple pebbles to put on Edwin's tombstone. That will be the end."

His wife, Marcia, was 5 when her uncle died. Urolatis was a basketball player and had studied Russian history and language at Brown University. His family didn't know he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency.

"We thought he worked for Proctor & Gamble," she said.

Marcia Charter's father handled arrangements for receiving the body because her grandparents, as Polish immigrants, spoke little English. Charter said her father died in 1992 still believing his brother had been a Proctor & Gamble salesman who was looking for work on the West Coast.

"Daddy waited to get the body, but on the way back the train crashed," she said, explaining that the coffin had been damaged. This compounded the Urolatises' grief because they were forced to break family tradition with a closed-casket service.

Brian Kreimendahl was 9 years old when the crash killed his father, Rodney, 38, a Lockheed engineer and U-2 horizontal tail designer.

He traveled from Southern California to the Mount Charleston Lodge with his wife and sister, but decided the hike to the ridge top would be too emotional.

"I have felt more emotion about this affair in the last nine months than I did in the previous 44 years," he said, noting that "these recent events with Steve Ririe have forced me to think what this all has meant."

"I don't like the answer that I come up with," said Kreimendahl, who believes Air Force procedures contributed to the accident.

Ririe tracked down Kreimendahl, a structural engineer at Lockheed-Martin's plant in Palmdale, Calif., two years after the U-2 program and the accident investigation report had been declassified in 1998.

In essence, investigators found that the pilot, 1st Lt. George M. Pappas, became disoriented because of the secret nature of the flight to reach Area 51 -- flying in radio silence, under visual flight rules, on a new route to shave 10 minutes off the trip -- combined with snow flurries in the Spring Mountains and misinformation about wind speeds.

Pappas, who had logged 1,383 hours flying C-54s, and co-pilot Paul Winham with 682 hours, thought they were on the west side of the Spring Mountains. Instead, a 60-knot crosswind, twice as much as expected, pushed them into a canyon heading toward Charleston Peak.

"Lt. Pappas started climbing to gain altitude to clear the surrounding terrain. The strong cross winds ... drifted him to an area east of where he thought himself to be. Wreckage of the aircraft indicates that he was using rated military engine power and ten to fifteen degrees of flaps, in an effort to get on top of the clouds as quickly as possible," according to the declassified report.

The plane hit the mountain at 8:19 a.m., based on a watch with a shattered crystal that was recovered from the site.

In reconstructing the accident, Air Force officials said Pappas must have realized he was in trouble "because he broke SOP (standard operating procedure) and radioed Watertown. Later investigation concluded that radio transmission was poor. Pappas' transmission was heard at the Nellis Air Force Base radio tower, but no transmission was reported received at Watertown. Nellis tower did not reply, as they did not want to interfere with his transmission to Watertown."

The plane, which had been modified so passengers could not see out the windows, clipped the ridge 50 feet below the crest, skipped about 60 feet, and slid another 20 feet before it came to rest and partially burned.

Kreimendahl said the Aug. 4 gathering was meaningful because he got to meet other relatives of the crash victims, including the Hanks family, of New Mexico, who for four decades never knew of Fred Hanks' involvement in the U-2 project, and wasn't contacted by the government for a CIA ceremony in 1998 to mark development of the spy plane.

"I felt so bad for them," Kreimendahl said. "Here we have what appears to me to be a very close family of genuine Americans that have no knowledge of their older brother's contributions to a project that was critical for our nation's security."

Hanks, 35, was a camera-repair specialist and Air Force reconnaissance squad member during the Korean War. According to friend and former co-worker Denny Thatcher, Hanks was working for Hycon Manufacturing Co., of Pasadena, Calif., which developed camera equipment for the U-2.

He died along with physicist Harold Silent, 59, a Hycon consultant, who was the oldest on board and revered by Thatcher as "one of the finest gentlemen I have ever known, and possibly the most intelligent."

At 22, CIA security officer Terence O'Donnell was one of the youngest on the plane. Raised in the Parkchester section of the Bronx, New York, he was a lifeguard and former swim-team captain at Fordham University.

O'Donnell's family knew that his CIA work had taken him to Los Angeles. Research turned up a letter to his sister, Jo, dated Sept. 5, 1955. To protect identities and locations, mail during this time was sent and received through a third party.

"Jo, I bet you didn't know that I flew in one of those big planes you see in the sky. Yes, I am going to many interesting places and always by airplane," the letter said. Two months would pass until the fatal flight and delayed recovery of the bodies.

Others who died in the crash:

• William H. Marr, 37, of Hyattsville, Md., chief CIA security officer for the U-2 project. He was awarded the CIA's Intelligence Medal of Merit posthumously.

• James F. Bray, 48, of Houston, the CIA's regional deputy chief security stationed at the Groom Lake installation.

• James "Billy" Brown, 23, of Savannah, Ga., a CIA security staff member. "I always knew Billy was a hero, and the recently declassified material simply proves my lifelong belief," said his nephew, Sam Wolling.

• Staff Sgt. Clayton Farris, 26, of Walnut, Iowa, a flight mechanic technician.

• Airman 2nd Class Guy R. Fasolas, 22, a flight attendant from Nephi, Utah.

• Sgt. John H. Gaines, 23, of Ripley, Tenn., a career enlisted man.

When the plane didn't arrive at Groom Lake, test pilots at the facility began an aerial search. It was found that afternoon but the first attempt at a rescue -- dropping in paratroopers -- had to be aborted because of severe winds.

A mountaineering team from March Air Force Base in California made the second attempt, trying to reach the site on skis and snowshoes from the north side of the mountain. But they encountered freezing, snowy conditions and were forced to stay one night on a 6-foot ledge with their sleeping bags dangling over the edge.

Three days after the crash, a team of some 20 men on horseback -- most of them members of the Clark County Mounted Posse -- along with two Air Force officers reached the site to recover the bodies and top-secret paperwork about the U-2 project.

Among the posse leaders were Merle Frehner and Eldon "Buster" Ballinger.

Frehner's daughter, Judy Brown of Las Vegas, said her father always said that day was the hardest of his life. When Frehner and the last of the posse made it down the mountain, she said, the Air Force rewarded their efforts with Spam sandwiches, "and he had to pay for them, too."

Ballinger, who was 34 at the time, remembered the difficulty that the horses encountered punching through the snow.

"That snow was so deep, their hooves weren't touching the ground," he said. "They were on their bellies. Some slipped and went over the side. They didn't have any footing.

"When we got up there, we weren't allowed to go inside the wreckage. The officers went in and removed all the written material, luggage, briefcases and mail. They packed it in duffel bags. There were three duffel bags," said Ballinger, 80, of Henderson.

He was among the few who were selected to go in and remove the bodies.

"They were still in their seats, in their safety belts. Just a couple of them were thrown out," he said.

The 14 were brought out and put in body bags. "We put them over the saddles and tied them on the best we could ... It was mighty cold, the coldest weather I've ever been in," he said.

A portion of the plane's fuselage remained intact on the ridge top until the summer of 1956 when, at the request of the U.S. Forest Service, Air Force crews blew it up with dynamite because its precarious positioning posed a safety hazard.