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| Over 400 military aircraft crash sites located in Arizona, New Mexico and Southern California from WWII through the Cold War. |
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Marine Corps Vought OS2U Kingfisher # 5351 crashed in Chiricahua Mountains in southeastern Arizona, October 12, 1941 Summary: The pilot of the Kingfisher, Marine Corps Flight Sergeant Edward McMahon, was ferrying the aircraft from New York to San Diego. While on the East Coast, he picked up a passenger, 23 year-old Navy Radio Operator Oscar Rohrer, who was trying to get to his home in San Diego to visit his wife on furlough. On the afternoon of October 12, the two men departed El Paso at 4:15 in the afternoon and set a heading for Tucson, Arizona. As the aircraft approached the Chiricahua Mountains it began to encounter cloudbanks which obscured Flight Sergeant McMahon's visibility. As he began to fly up a sharply rising canyon near the small mountain town of Paradise, he concluded he did not have the altitude necessary to clear the mountain range and banked hard to the left to reverse his course back out of the canyon. Just as he almost completed his turn, his left wing struck a tall Juniper tree which caused his aircraft to crash onto the mountainside. Tragically, McMahon was killed in the crash, but amazingly, his passenger Navy Radioman Oscar Rohrer was catapulted from the crashing aircraft and only suffered a broken nose and lacerations on his forehead. Despite bleeding profusely, he managed to hike down the canyon until he was rescued by local ranchers who heard the crash and formed a search party and headed up the mountain. Investigators concluded that had McMahon turned a mere 20 feet earlier he would have missed the large Juniper tree. Unfortunately, Oscar Rohrer passed away a few years ago. However, his family greatly appreciated the information and photos I passed on as they had no documentation of the crash and only knew what he had told them.
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