Final Flight

Eight stories woven around the mystery of the Bucks Elbow Mountain, Virginia, plane crash of 1963. In the early fall of 1963 both the Shenandoah National Park Service and the fire stations on the Virginia Piedmont plain on the eastern side of the Blue Ridge Mountains are called during a nighttime thunderstorm. A small forest fire, reportedly preceded by an explosion, has been observed on the eastern slope of Bucks Elbow Mountain, ten miles north on the Skyline Drive from where highway 250 crosses the Blue Ridge at Rockfish Gap. The rain is heavy and the site of the fire is remote. By the time the park rangers have descended to the burn area from the Turk Gap parking area and the firefighters have ascended to it, the fire has essentially been doused by the rain. What the crews find is the smoldering fuselage of a twin-engine Beechcraft Baron aircraft. In the smoldering wreckage are two bodies, later determined to be that of a man and a woman, burned beyond ready identification. No one reports missing a plane-or a man or woman for that matter-and no flight plan is on file for a Beechcraft Baron in the Central Virginia airspace for that night. What could be the story behind this crash? From this real scenario, which remains unsolved to this day, Olivia Stowe has woven eight separate short stories on events that fit the facts and that could plausibly explain what brought that plane and those two people to oblivion in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Preceding these stories is an additional story, "Fire on the Mountain," giving fictional accounts of the crash from the various perspectives of those on the ground that night.