Jet crashes at
Hickory airport; 1 dead
HANNAH MITCHELL
Staff Writer
WCNC Video: From the scene
HICKORY - Witnesses: Plane was trying to take off but went off runway, burned The pilot of a single-engine Korean War-era fighter jet died Monday when the airplane skidded off a runway at Hickory Regional Airport, crashed and exploded.
Close friends and the pilot's pastor identified him as Wyatt Fuller, a vintage-airplane buff who was headed to an air show in Oshkosh, Wis., when the crash happened. He was piloting a 1954 F-86 Sabre made in Canada.
Officials with the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board arrived on the scene late Monday afternoon to start investigating the accident, the only fatality that Hickory officials can recall at the small airport.
Officials said they didn't know what caused the crash.
The plane wreckage continued to smolder Monday afternoon where it came to rest outside an airport fence.
It lay in pieces, with the tail and wings in the middle of Hickory Airport/Rhodhiss Road, its nose in a gully next to the pilot's body. The airplane's formerly polished silver fuselage was blackened from the flames.
The crash was reported to emergency officials at 11:42 a.m. Flames had engulfed the plane when firefighters from the airport got to the scene two minutes later, said Hickory Fire Department spokesman Terri Byers.
The pilot had been attempting takeoff down one of the airport's two runways when the crash happened, Byers said. The plane carried a full load of about 800 gallons of fuel.
Kenneth Bowen, who lives across from the airport, said he saw the crash as he talked with his mailman in front of his house. He said he heard the plane's engine and thought it was coming in for a landing.
Then the engine stopped and he saw the plane moving down the runway, smoke coming from its brakes.
"And it wouldn't hold, and he just kept going," Bowen said. "I said, `Oh God, he ain't going to stop.' He went over the bank and then exploded. I could feel the heat from all the way over here."
Bowen said he had seen the vintage plane before. He moved into his house about two years ago so he could watch the planes flying in and out of the airport. He is afraid to ride in planes, he said, but loves to see them.
He said he had seen Fuller's F-86 doing fancy moves, flying low and then climbing straight up into the air. "I thought that was what he was going to do today, but he didn't."
Bowen's mailman, John Little, said that when the Sabre hit the grass next to the runway, it appeared to backfire and caught the grass on fire in one spot. Then the plane went over an embankment and flipped onto its top.
"I got in my postal vehicle and went down there," Little said. "It was probably 45 seconds after it happened and the whole cockpit area was totally consumed in fire."
Lee Shargel, a friend of Fuller's, said he had been waiting for Fuller to arrive Monday at the Experimental Aircraft Association AirVenture air show in Oshkosh, Wis., to begin filming a television show about Fuller and his involvement in flying and motorcycle design.
He said he heard the news about the accident from Fuller's chief mechanic, who was staying in the hotel room next door to him.
"We had been talking about the show for a few months. We drew up contracts and were going to start filming today," Shargel said. "Now we're going to film a one-hour documentary in memory of him. Everybody's crying."
Fuller owned a half dozen warplanes that were listed under Flying Fossiles, a limited liability company based in Hickory.
"If he wasn't known by name, he was known by his planes," said Ken Terry, operations officer for a Florida air show where Fuller had shown planes for six to eight years. "They were all meticulously restored. Wyatt spent small fortunes on his planes."
His F-86 Sabre was one of a handful still flyable, Terry said. More than 5,500 Sabres were built in the United States and Canada.
Fuller had long admired the jet, an Air Force one-seater similar to those flown in the Korean War, when he found one for sale on the Internet, according to a story in the Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle.
He bought it in 2003 and thought it would take a few months to get it flying. It took 1 1/2 years to restore in Mojave, Calif., where it had been stored.
The plane, built by Canadair, originally had been flown in the Royal Canadian Air Force and then was owned by a flight testing company.
For a while, it was assigned to Col. James Kasler, a decorated American pilot in Korea and Vietnam, where he was a POW for seven years after his plane was shot down in 1966.
"That's one of the reasons we worked so hard and went to the lengths we did," Fuller told the Augusta newspaper. "We felt like we owed it to the public and owed it to him.
"The plane was meant to fly; it's what it was built for."
Jim Carr, who flies with the Civil Air Patrol and who kept his airplane next to Fuller's at the Hickory airport, said Fuller had to make an emergency landing in the Sabre jet at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama this spring.
Carr said the plane's right landing gear failed to fully extend and that Fuller landed the plane on the nose and left main wheels, then set down the right side on the underwing fuel tank and slid on the fuel tank until the plane came to a stop.
He said Fuller had spent the past couple of months taking apart the plane and cleaning it to prepare for the Oshkosh air show.
Carr said that amid his tinkering, Fuller was friendly and liked to talk with kids interested in aviation. "I could bring a young cadet (teenage Civil Air Patrol student) to his hangar and he would stop what he was doing and show them."
Fuller, a former airline pilot who also made a name for himself as a motorcycle designer for Harley-Davidson, had a generous nature, said Ruffin Snow, pastor of Tri-City Baptist Church in Conover, where Fuller had been a member for a decade.
Snow spent much of the afternoon with members of Fuller's family. He said Fuller has three children.
"He did a flyover this past November for our Veterans Day service at the church," Snow said. "We had a ceremony with a 21-gun salute and then here came Wyatt and he did a barrel roll or whatever you call it, and it was so thrilling. He did all that just out of the goodness of his heart."
