Crash
The sole survivor of the crash was Foye Kenneth Roberts who died at Wichita Falls, Texas on 4 February 2004. In an amazing coincidence, Joseph Gordon Roberts, also of the 317th Troop Carrier Group, was due to be a passenger on the plane, but missed the flight due to sleeping in and arriving late at the airfield.
Due to wartime censorship, nothing of the incident was reported in the media. The Daily Mercury, Mackay's newspaper, reported the following day that a visiting American serviceman had been injured, as well as an editorial expressing the sentiments of locals who knew what had happened. Nothing more appeared in the local media until February 1946, after the war had ended. Victims' relatives received War Department telegrams which said little more than the serviceman had been killed in an air crash in the south west Pacific.
Australia's second worst aviation disaster, the 1960 TAA Fokker Friendship disaster, coincidentally also occurred at Mackay.
Read more about this topic: Bakers Creek Air Crash
Famous quotes containing the word crash:
“Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are layed waste, rivers grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever.... Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“Crash on crash of the sea,
straining to wreck men, sea-boards, continents,
raging against the world, furious.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“You crash over the trees,
you crack the live branch.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)