50 years ago: a Christmas miracle in Peters Township
Courtesy of Velvet Siegel
Pilot Willis Voshell, center, stands in front of his airplane in 1971 with his flight instructor, Jim Hutchins, and an unidentified man.
Courtesy of Velvet Siegel
This picture by an unknown photographer shows the wreckage of the plane in the parking lot of Vitte’s Hardware Dec. 26, 1971. In the background are stores in the Donaldsons Crossroads Shopping Center.
Peters Township Police officer Scott Patton is shown in uniform circa 1971.
Editor’s note: On Christmas night, 50 years ago, four souls were hopelessly lost, their light plane off course, its fuel gauge reading empty. Below them stretched a dark landscape, punctured by pinpoints of light from houses and street lamps like stars in a vast, black sky.
Then, as his passengers silently prayed and the pilot frantically searched for someplace to land, a long row of parallel lights appeared ahead of them: not an airport but the nearly empty parking lot of the shopping center at Donaldsons Crossroads.
As the engine sputtered and stopped, the pilot glided the plane between the lights to the surface, but not to safety.
This is a story about the events of the night of Dec. 25, 1971, told from the point of view of the Peters Township police officer first on the scene of the crash, and also by the survivors.
Today’s installment was written by Scott Patton, who served three years on the Peters Township force before beginning a career in education, teaching industrial arts in Mt. Lebanon School District until his retirement.
The second part is told in the words of those who survived the crash – the two daughters and son-in-law of the pilot, Willis Voshell, who died in 2001.
And a half-century after the accident, the police officer and those three survivors would meet again at the place where the wreckage came to rest, a reunion of sorts and a celebration of what all of them would come to consider a Christmas miracle.
Fifty years ago, before all of its commercial and residential development, Peters Township was fairly quiet. Nevertheless, for police officers like me, Saturday nights could get busy, and typically two cars were on patrol.
But not this night.
It was Dec. 25, 1971 – Christmas – and everything was closed, so I was the only officer on duty. At 9:30 p.m., as I was driving north on Route 19 up near the old Pancake House, the silence broke.
“Radio to Car 5,” the dispatcher said.
“Car 5, go ahead, Helen.”
“There’s been an accident with a small aer-o-plane (that’s how Helen Motto pronounced it) in the parking lot behind Vitte’s. Check it out.”
“Ten-Four.”
With almost no traffic on the road, I made a U-turn and headed back toward Donaldsons Crossroads, trying to imagine what might await me. Could it be some kid losing control of a model plane that he got as a Christmas gift and doing damage to Vitte’s building? Or hurting a bystander? Or was it something much, much worse?
By the end of the night I would realize that what I found myself smack in the middle of was nothing short of a Christmas miracle.
n n n
About a year ago, someone on the “Peters Township – A Walk Down Memory Lane” page on Facebook asked, “Does anyone know anything about a plane crash at Donaldsons Crossroads in the 1970s?” Another person answered by posting an article about the crash from the Washington Observer-Reporter, and the thread attracted many comments.
No one in this area remembers it better than I do.
I can easily recall my anxiety growing as I sped south on Route 19, my foot getting heavier on the gas pedal.
“Radio to Car 5,” crackled the voice of dispatcher.
“Go ahead, Helen,” I answered.
“You’ll be sure to let me know right away if you need an ambulance.”
I whizzed past Yenko Chevrolet at 70 mph, and the radio crackled again.
“Car 5, I just got a call from the County Airport and they had that aer-o-plane on radar when it went down, so you are to secure the area until the team gets out there. And I’ve gone ahead and called out the ambulance.”
“Dammit, Helen!” I thought, “Why didn’t you say it was a ‘plane crash’!”
I switched on the siren and put the pedal to the medal. I must have been going 100 mph as I passed Ernie’s Esquire. I knew that when I crested the hill past Eat n’ Park that I’d be able to see down the straightaway to the Crossroads, and that I might soon be seeing flames and smoke and fire. I imagined the dreadful sight of death and destruction that awaited me just another minute down the highway. “Oh, the humanity!”
As I passed the northern end of Old Oak Road I backed off the accelerator. I could see the amber light flashing at the Crossroads, but I couldn’t see any glow of fire reflecting off buildings. I killed the siren. “There’s always a huge fire and debris scattered everywhere when there’s been a plane crash”, I thought. But I saw none of that.
“What the hell, Helen!” I thought. “What kind of a wild goose chase have you sent me on?”
I killed the red lights as I slowed down and rolled through the crossroads. Still no fire, no flames, no debris, no dismembered bodies strewn about. I slowed to a crawl as I entered Vitte’s parking lot and saw that the hardware store was closed and dark. As I turned, my headlights scanned across the lot. Nothing.
And then, after turning a full 90 degrees, there it was: a small airplane, standing on its nose with its tail up in the air at a 45-degree angle, with smoke or steam rising from it. The right wing was torn back parallel to the fuselage, the plane having wrapped itself around one of the parking lot’s light poles.
Aiding the survivors
I had never witnessed a plane crash before, and here I was, charged with securing the site. My mind raced as I tried to think what to do first. Maybe she’s about to blow, I thought, so I’d better get over there and recover the bodies, or whatever. But the wreckage didn’t seem all that bad, and maybe the occupants were still alive.
Just then, a side door opened and a young man with a bloody face exited the aircraft. I slammed the car into park and ran over to assist. In just a minute or two I had three of the four occupants out of the wreckage and safely away from the explosion I feared would come.
Two of the occupants, the young man who first exited and the pilot, were bleeding from the face. A third passenger, a young girl, did not appear at first glance to be injured. The pilot, who seemed to be in a trance, kept repeating over and over, “They said to take a heading of 332 and I did take 332 but they kept telling me I was wrong …”
Then I heard sirens and saw the approaching red lights of the VFW ambulance which wheeled into the parking lot and pulled up next to me. The first order of business was to get the fourth victim – who had severe back pain – out of the plane. I helped the attendants very little as they got the young lady on a backboard, and then all four victims were loaded into the single ambulance. Then the rear doors were slammed shut and off they went, leaving me standing alone at a safe distance from the wreckage in the chill silence of Vitte’s parking lot.
My job had been to secure the area, but it was Christmas night, and there wasn’t anything or anyone to secure it from. Everything was closed, except the Crest Theater. And when the show (a double feature, “T.R. Baskin” and “Let’s Scare Jessica to Death”) was over, the moviegoers emerged and discovered something much scarier had occurred in the parking lot. Exercising my authority as securer of the area, I held back the crowd – all 12 of them.
Another car came screeching into the lot, and out popped Sgt. Gene Fetty. He rushed over to me and asked about the plane’s occupants.
I told him that the plane had carried three passengers plus the pilot and that I had assisted them in the first few minutes after my arrival at the scene and then the ambulance arrived. I told him that I had helped the emergency response crew get the victims into the ambulance and that they had left a short time ago and were headed to St. Clair Hospital.
“What were there names?” he demanded.
“Uh, I dunno; it all happened so fast I just …”
“Well, the pilot’s license. You did get the license, didn’t you?”
“Uh… no. I never thought to…”
“What! You didn’t get the license?”
“Uh, sorry, Sergeant. This is my first plane crash.”
He was pretty steamed. (I think it was his first plane crash, too.)
“Well, get in your car and get over to the hospital and get his pilot’s license and get a statement and write a report on what happened here!”
Flying off course
After a long wait in the hospital’s emergency room, I was able to interview the pilot, Willis Voshell, 49, of Dover, Delaware, who was not seriously injured but was emotionally upset. I learned that his initial flight plan was to fly from Delaware to Connellsville. His passengers were his daughters Geraldine, 17, and Velvet, 10, and Geraldine’s boyfriend, Warren Spiker, 20, who was the young man whose face had slammed into the cockpit dashboard.
Spiker, from Masontown, had joined the military and was stationed at Dover AFB in Delaware. Voshell’s plan was to fly him home to visit his family on Christmas Day and return that night. But when they returned to the Connellsville airport after their visit, they found the airport closed for the holiday. Taking off would not be a problem, but reaching home would be because they needed fuel.
“I went on the radio and called an ‘all-point,’ asking for any airport where I could fuel up,” Mr. Voshell told me.
The Morgantown, W.Va., airport answered him, telling him to take a heading of 195 degrees and that he was 15 minutes away.
“Well, I took the heading of 195, but then they called back and said, ‘You were supposed to take a heading of 195,'” Mr. Voshell continued.
“I am heading at 195, I told them, but they answered that I was going in the opposite direction.”
The Morgantown controller gave the pilot an adjusted heading, but he was still going the wrong way. Further adjustments only put the plane father and farther away. Finally, a controller from Allegheny County Airport interrupted and said he was just 15 minutes from that location and gave the pilot a new compass direction. He asked for his fuel reading, and Mr. Voshell said, “My gauge is reading, well, near empty.”
Mr. Voshell was told that Allegheny had him on radar and that his course was good. The controller stayed on the radio with him, reassuring him and giving him slight course adjustments. At seven minutes from the airport, the controller asked how much fuel was left.
“My gauge is on empty,” he replied.
By that time, everyone was praying, Mr. Voshell told me.
Then a long line of lights came into view. Mr. Voshell remembered screaming into the radio mike, “Thank, God! I can see your runway lights! We’re going to make it!”
Wishful thinking
The controller responded, “No! You ARE NOT seeing our runway lights; We have you on radar and you are still six miles away.”
“No, you’re wrong, because I DO see the lights,” the pilot remembered saying. “We’re going to set her down. We’re going to be OK!”
Of course, Mr. Voshell was NOT seeing the runway lights of Allegheny County Airport and he soon realized that he was looking at the lights of a large parking lot – Donaldsons Crossroads Shopping Center! And being Christmas Night the only cars were in a small area at the north end of the lot near the Crest Theater! He did a low flyover and realized that what he was seeing was not the airport, but that it was a well-lighted, paved and near-empty parking lot, and he made the immediate decision that it was far better to land there than to risk running out of fuel short of the airport. He made a wide turn over Queen of Heaven Cemetery and lined up with the lights for his final approach. Just then the engine sputtered, then stopped.
Pushing fear aside, he knew that his Beechcraft had enough speed and altitude to glide to the landing. He could come in to about 10 feet off the ground and then pull the nose up sharply and plop it down, landing in the shortest possible distance as he had learned to do in such emergency landings during his pilot training.
The parking lot lights were on, except for two on poles centered on the entry road coming into the shopping center from East McMurray Road. For some reason those two lights were off, and they were right in the glide line. Mr. Voshell never saw them.
Just as Voshell lifted the nose of the plane into a stall, his right wing hit one of the light poles. The impact spun the plane to the right. It “plopped” down and skidded on its nose in the shopping center lot, through a narrow grass strip and into the small lot behind Vitte’s Hardware, where it screeched to a halt.
In the end, the four occupants were able to walk away from the accident, with some assistance. However, if the pilot had instead tried to reach the airport and had run out of fuel, he probably would not have found an empty lot in which to land. Had the crash occurred the night before, when the parking lot might have been filled with cars and shoppers, the outcome would most likely have been quite different – and tragic.
I did finally get all the information Sgt. Fetty demanded and filed my report. In my career as a police officer, I would write many crime and accident reports, too many to remember. But that one – the one about the Christmas miracle – that one I will never forget.