Sounds bad. This local-paper report…

http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/news/fiesta-123823-air-crash.html

…reports 60- to 70-percent burns, which isn’t often survivable.

We’re all sorry, but on PPRuNe, for one, there’s a kind of unwritten ban on endless RIP and my-heart-goes-out-to-the-family messages. It’s obvious, it’s done, we’re all sorry, let’s not get into a shirt-rending contest to see who’s sorrier…I agree that happymeal’s input is worthy of posting.

Tangmere, I am not a member of Tighar and have neither the time nor the ability to answer your specific questions. I’d suggest that you go to their website and pose the questions to Ric Gillespie.

“As unreliable as wiki might be? it provides some alternative explanations?”

Mark, all of this has been well-known to Tighar for years. No surprises here. In fact, I think Wiki got most of their material from Tighar’s website.

“…resorts to calling someone they don’t even know a moron.”

How strange that nobody understands that what I was saying was, “If he can call a person he doesn’t even know a con artist, does that make it all right for me to call him a moron?”

Obviously not. But I was unaware that I had to explain that.

As for flying an airplane one-handed, that’s hardly the worst I’ve done in the air. (Mr. Page, are you a pilot? Didn’t think so.)

Part of the problem is the assumption–and we can argue till we’re blue in the keyboard as to whether or not it’s a fair one–that by “the saving of endangered aircraft” it means Tighar goes in with bulldozers, backhoes, barges, winches and derricks and literally “saves aircraft.”

That has never been their intent. Were they to find Earhart’s airplane, for example, they would use their resources to combine whatever rights they had to the find with a museum or organization that would assumedly pay for and do a proper recovery. Tighar is -not- in the recovery business, and they’re not in the business of making money off finds. Sure, Gillespie would write a presumed bestseller about the Earhart discovery if it happened, and sell documentary film rights, etc., but really his mission is to keep these aircraft out of the hands of the warbirders who will save the data plate and some parts and eventually produce a polyurethaned artifact of little truly archival value.

When they got involved with the New Guinea B-17 (never properly named Swamp Ghost any more than the Hughes Hercules was named Spruce Goose, by the way), it was an Air Force museum that would do the recovery, a project that never came to fruition.

Part of the apparent loathing of Ric Gillespie seems to come from the fact that he continues to put together the funds to do what he’s doing, which infuriates those who haven’t the ability to do anything like that, and part of it comes from the fact that the media finds him charming (which I can assure you he actually is), and this really steams those who haven’t got such a pulpit.

Frankly, I find what Gillespie has accomplished while -not- finding Earhart’s Electra vastly more interesting than what somebody achieves by buying a supposed Spitfire spade grip at a yard sale. (At least that’s what we call them in the U. S. I remember years ago driving around England wondering why so many people were selling shoes by the roadside, what with all the signs for “boot sales…”)

I’ve been on one Tighar expedition, in Maine searching for l’Oiseau Blanc. We didn’t find so much as a Gauloise butt, yet it was a fabulous experience. Even though I broke my arm and had to fly my Comanche back to New York one-handed–one of the dumbest pieces of piloting I’ve ever done.

Oh, and by the way…Tighar never claimed to have “discovered” either the so-called Swamp Ghost, the Devastator or the Welsh P-38. Go to their site and read what it says about these aircraft and tell me where it says THEY discovered them.