fascinatinghorror

The Grand Canyon Mid-air Collision

Added 2023-02-28 11:15:00 +0000 UTC

Here are a few tangents from this week’s story. And a recommendation: if you find the Grand Canyon as fascinating as me, I’d definitely grab a copy of Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon by Thomas Myers and Michael Ghiglieri, from which I learned of both these side stories.

Billingsley’s odyssey

A fair few people visited the crash sites in the years following this disaster… but none are more infamous than Robert Billingsley of Ajo, Arizona. He decided to float out there via the flooded Colorado River on a raft he’d built himself out of junk. Once he got started, though, he found the river rather difficult to navigate and promptly got lost.

A search and rescue operation was launched, but didn’t locate him. Miraculously, despite his totally inadequate raft, and despite getting sick after eating foraged prickly pear cactus, he managed to reach the crash site. Even more miraculously, he later found his way out of the Grand Canyon alive.

Billingsley swore that he’d only visited the crash site out of morbid curiosity… but it later came to light that he’d taken several items – including wedding rings he’d found on the fingers of a decomposed hand. Billingsley admitted that he’d been thinking of selling the rings for profit. He doesn’t sound like a particularly moral character… but at least he confessed to everything when he was told that he’d committed a crime by looting the dead.

The flying bananas

Several sources referred to the helicopters used to ferry people to and wreckage from the crash sites as “flying bananas”. A little further reading revealed that they were, in fact, Piasecki H-21 helicopters… which do, indeed, have a raised tail section that makes the whole thing somewhat resemble a banana.

Here’s a picture:

Why were they designed like this? In short, it was to make them more manoeuvrable. With the aft rotor mounted on the raised tail section, the helicopter could tilt to any angle without the blades striking one another, or the body of the helicopter. That extra manoeuvrability would have been vital for those tricky canyon flights!