Dispatch Number 7 -Some Live Some Don't

Aside from all the landing gear having been ripped off and one of the propellers hanging from an engine the aircraft was in excellent shape. The wings and tail were unscratched and the freshly waxed fuselage was strangely absent of any dust in this dusty country. The twin engine Beechcraft Air King 200 sat at the end of a dirt runway up a slope. One thing was clear - it ran out of fuel. I believed this because only the lower half of the 4-blade propellers were bent on both engines. Neither engine was running when it landed. Once I realized it was a plane crash lurid thoughts swirled about when I peered into the cockpit windows, half expecting to see blood or something equally disturbing.

The beach camp I stayed at was adjacent to the runway and part of a decrepit resort long past its days when guests arrived by plane to play and party; its thatched roofs rotted away, a bar long abandoned and only a couple cabanas remained. San Francisquito sat on one of the most stunning crescent beaches on the Sea of Cortez; its sands were blond and coarse. The sense of desolation was punctuated by 100 miles of dirt to the nearest paved highway. I walked the length of the runway several times; it had no numbers, no landing lights, its boundaries were marked by hundreds of white washed stones and an air sock that hung from a rusty pole as a shard of faded ribbon. I started to ask around this village of 25 people to understand what happened with the white plane sitting at the end of runway. The story was shocking and happened just four days before I arrived.

Four days earlier in San Diego, California a twin engine air ambulance was called to fly down to Cabo San Lucas and pick up a patient; it had two pilots, a doctor and a nurse. One-way was a 1,000 mile flight. They made it halfway when at 27,000 feet the fuel ran dry and the heavy aircraft capable of speeds of 340 mph became a glider. Mayday calls went out as the pilot prepared to ditch into the sea. These radio calls were horrific terror filled transmissions with coordinate calls mixed with screams, "We're gonna Die!" as the plane glided rapidly to earth. Shock. Fear. Terror. Disbelief. And resignation.

Ten miles to the south of San Francisquito is the equally desolate fishing village of El Barril that has an airstrip of its own. A wealthy American has a get-a-way house there that he flies to. By divine intervention, and this is all you could call it, Tim, the American was in El Barril when the Mayday call went out. He told the panicked pilots of the runway at San Francisquito giving them a one-time chance to crash land on a runway rather than certain and violent death by ditching into the sea. Baja is filled with these dirt landing strips.

According to Howard, a seasonal resident from the United States, who lives on the final approach said the sound of the gliding plane was loud as it came in too fast and too high. It hit the runway at the halfway mark then bounced twice when finally its wheels made solid contact with the loose dirt and began to skid on the last fraction of runway coming to a rest up a slope leaving broken off landing gear in its wake. There were deep scores on the runway that continued up the slope to where the plane came to rest.

Howard raced over in his truck and found among the clouds of settling dust four adrenaline riddled people talking excitedly describing their near death experience. One of them claimed, after a life of non belief, to have found god. Shortly after the crash, Tim flew in from El Barril and whisked them back to the United States. A pilot I met said, "It was a Dead Stick landing." and added without emotion that, "Planes are replaceable, it is just a plane, you can't replace people."

Baja California, Mexico is a frontier in the true sense of the meaning of the old wild west where there is little enforcement of laws or governance on this sparsely populated desert peninsula; it is one of the attractions of the place. After three visits to the plane I gathered the nerve to board it. The plane was not roped off and no investigation was underway by the insurance company or Mexican authorities. It was an unattended plane worth $6 million new. I pulled the handle and the door came down. I walked up the steps and crouched in the cabin past a hospital bed and some oxygen tanks. The inside was in remarkably good order. The cockpit was tidy in the way cockpits are, flight notes were scribbled on the back of a second hand envelope held in place by a clip. There was a wet bar and opened aircraft manuals. I snapped some photos and closed the door after what felt like 10-minutes.

From what I was able to piece together talking with others was that there was a communication failure between the pilot and ground crew regarding fuel load and Captain error by not performing basic pre-flight checks. Four people nearly died because of this inexcusably sloppy pre-flight check.

The plane sat flat on its belly on a rancher's property adjacent to the airstrip. Betto was his name and he had a sense of humor. After a couple beers I was unable to bridle my curiosity and asked about the plane crash. I was witness and participant to cruel irony. Turns out Betto lost his wife eight years earlier when the plane she was in ran out of fuel and crashed in Ensenada, Mexico.

Cruel irony. Some live. Some don't.