Two fatal airplane crashes gripped the mill-town of Selleck in April 1953. They happened just days apart. The first, on April 14th saw a DC-3 carrying 22 soldiers and three crew members come down during snow flurries, in the upper Cedar River basin about 10 miles east of Selleck. Seven ultimately died after one engine failed and the plane fell to the forest below. More than 200 rescue workers and town folk were involved in that rescue and recovery. Just nine days later, on April 23, an American Air Transport C-46 went down on a nearby ridge misidentified as Cedar Mountain. While the DC-3 crash received extensive newspaper coverage, the C-46 downing received almost none.
The American Air Transport plane was en route from Columbia, South Carolina to Seattle and carried four crew members, all experienced flyers. The C-46 stopped in Cheyenne, Wyoming to refuel allowing the two sets of pilots to switch positions. When approaching the Cascade Range near Easton, Captain Maurice Booska made radio contact with the Seattle Air Route Traffic Control Center, but garbled communication introduced a mistake about the flight’s prescribed elevation. Rather than maintaining the plane at 8,000 feet, the plane descended to 4,000, which shouldn’t have happen until over Hobart, near Maple Valley.
The two survivors reported it was raining with periodic snow showers at the time of the crash. The aircraft first struck a large tree approximately 200 east of the mountain crest at the 4,000-foot level. Aircraft wreckage was found scattered along a 950-foot swath on both sides of the ridge. Captain Maurice Booska, age 34, and First Officer, Donald Dwelley, age 30, both perished. Two survivors, John W. Schroeder, pilot and J.B. Gilbert, co-pilot, operated the aircraft for the first leg of the transcontinental journey, but were passengers when miraculously saved. The C-46 went down near the DC-3 disaster of nine days earlier. This photo by Jim Huff shows rescuers carrying the two survivors from the wreck and comes courtesy of JoAnne Matsumura, an Issaquah historian and collector. Crash details were obtained from the Aeronautics Board’s investigative report.
