David Burger

Oct. 30, 2003

C273

Crash

 

Preservationist hopes to memorialize 19 dead in air crash

 

 

Fifty years ago yesterday the Resolution, an Australian Douglas DC-6, crashed into a fog-bound ridge eight miles southeast of Half Moon Bay, killing all 19 people on board.

To mark the occasion, there were no organized moments of silence, ceremonies or eulogies. The only remembrance was a hike Saturday morning into the wooded hills surrounding Kings Mountain, where the plane went down.

Christopher O'Donnell of Half Moon Bay was on the strenuous, six-and-a-half-mile hike conducted by guides of the Mid-Peninsula Open Space District, but his journey did not stop at the end of the trail. His ultimate aim is to bring the event into the public's focus on a larger scale, something he calls preservationism.

"I want to preserve the memories and the material of the worst aviation crash in the history of the county," he said. "This is my grand challenge, my grand quest."

O'Donnell is the founding member of the one-month-old Flight of the Resolution Memorial Fund (www.flightoftheresolution.org), through which a group of people who share his mission. They want to see a memorial erected on the crash site. If that can't be accomplished, they would like for some parts of the plane still remaining at the site to be placed in the Hiller Aviation Museum, located in San Carlos.

That is not as easy as it seems. Three weeks ago, the Mid-Peninsula Open Space District, which owns the land that includes the site, rejected the group's request for either of those options on the grounds that it wants the land to remain pristine and untouched.

O'Donnell was disappointed, but not discouraged. "I'm an adventurer, so I have to take the good with the bad," he said.

O'Donnell's interest in the project was rekindled only recently, but has its roots in his Australian boyhood. As a child, he was a member of the Aviation Historical Society of Australia, and he traded photographs of planes with other children around the world. He left Australia in the sixties, and lost track of his pen pals and the society.

Then last year O'Donnell bought his first computer, which he soon used to reestablish contact with the society. He received an e-mail in early September from a member who had noticed O'Donnell's Half Moon Bay address.

The Resolution's crash was the first fatal overseas accident ever by an Australian plane, and had more notoriety Down Under than here in the United States. The e-mail's author asked O'Donnell one question: "Did the crash site have a plaque?"

O'Donnell quickly learned that it did not, and in the process he heard interesting stories related to the crash that he described as a "drug" that wouldn't let him go: The flight, from Honolulu to San Francisco, was only minutes from being completed. The crash apparently happened because the pilot was overconfident in the morning fog and flew the plane straight into a mountain. One of the passengers was the famous 31-year-old American pianist William Kapell. Three major forest fires were caused by the accident. Most important, much of the wreckage, including most of one wing, still remained at the crash site.

In the past month, O'Donnell enlisted other people in the community to help in his attempts to memorialize the event, including Dave Pine of Burlingame, who was attracted to the project mostly because of his interest in history but also because of the founding member's personality.

"Christopher is a very passionate person who cares deeply about this matter," Pine said. "He's a colorful and animated guy who got involved in such a dramatic story."

During Saturday's hike, Pine and O'Donnell hoped to get to know the guides from the district to see if there is a way the landowner can be persuaded to memorialize the site or to let the wreckage be taken to a local museum. Either way, O'Donnell saw that as just the beginning.

"I can't turn back now," he said. "This is a good thing to do."