Sole survivor’s DC-3 flight canceled
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Bradley and the crash of Piedmont Flight #349 were the subject of a last October Hook cover story.PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER
For the second time in 50 years, a flight problem has meant that Phil Bradley won’t be landing in Charlottesville. The 83-year-old North Carolina man famously survived the 1959 crash that claimed 26 lives on final approach, but organizers of a commemorative event slated for May 5 decided not to tempt fate when a brake problem was discovered in the aging DC-3 that was to bring Bradley to the Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport Wednesday.
Organizer and Lynchburg-area resident Donald Stokes says that parts can’t be obtained in time to make the flight but that Bradley will go forward with a talk at Liberty University scheduled for 7pm May 4,
On October 31, 2009, Bradley played host to a ceremony at Mint Springs memorializing the lives of those who died. There, he told attendees he hopes someday to build a highly visible cross on Bucks Elbow Mountain, into which Piedmont Airlines Flight 349 crashed 50 years earlier.
Perhaps something other than a cross as a memorial would be a better choice.
good luck getting the Board of Supervisors to approve that giant cross in the side of a mountain.
The last thing Buck’s Elbow Mountain is a cross or any large memorial to mar it’s natural beauty. The memorial in Mint Springs Park is simple, stirring, and it is enough.
Yes it is………