COLUMN: Bill Nemitz

Fallen but not forgotten

Copyright © 2006 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.

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	On the Maine Road Columnist Bill Nemitz will be on the road until Labor Day weekend, reporting on people and places of interest in western and northern Maine. To top of story
	Staff photo by Gordon Chibroski Sixty-seven-year-old Everett Worcester examines the wreckage of his biplane in the woods near his home. He survived the nose-first crash with a head injury but awoke to find himself amid a fire that burned his legs.
	Staff photo by Gordon Chibroski Everett Worcester built this plane by hand and had been flying it near his home since 1988 until the engine quit and he crashed this summer, just before reaching the landing strip.
	LEARN MORE ONLINE: The official guide to experimental aircraft is available at: exp-aircraft.com An explanation of the cause of the airplane crash that killed John Denver: www.airsafe.com To view pictures of biplanes: www.photovault.com To top of story

ORNEVILLE TOWNSHIP - If this were like any other summer, Everett Worcester would be up there right now, 1,000 feet above the treetops. He would wave down at his neighbors from the open cockpit of the biplane he built with his own two hands. And his delighted neighbors would wave back at the 67-year-old aviator in his sheepskin flying hat, his old-fashioned goggles and, yes, his white silk scarf flapping against the oh-so-blue sky.

But this is not like any other summer.

"So," Everett said, holding out his hand in greeting to a recent visitor to his home with the landing strip in the backyard, "you came all this way to meet the guy who walked away from a plane crash""

That's right, sir.

"Then you've got a sick sense of humor," Everett replied with a chuckle. "Follow me."

Up the grassy landing strip he walked, past the small blueberry barrens where a handful of local teenagers were hard at work bringing in this year's crop. Near the far end of the strip, he veered off into the woods. There, tantalizingly close to a happy ending, sat what's left of his beloved biplane.

"She's torn up pretty bad," Everett said, understating the obvious. "Just a little bit more and I would have made it."

Everett started flying about 35 years ago. Heand his wife, Lee, had just moved to Louisiana from Texas, where they'd both earned their respective Ph.D.'s in education administration and special education. And for reasons he still can't explain, Everett couldn't seem to get his head out of the clouds.

"I had too much time on my hands," he said. "So I decided I wanted to learn how to fly."

He learned on a Piper J-3 Cub. Soon after getting his license, he bought a Cessna 120.

"That was back when flying was reasonable," Everett said. "Then it got really expensive, especially the price of fuel."

So he sold that plane. But after Everett and Lee moved back to Maine (he grew up Down East in the town of Columbia), the flying bug bit him once again.

Nineteen years ago, he bought a Renegade II "experimental amateur aircraft" kit from Murphy Aviation in British Columbia. He spent months building the two-seater in a small hangar behind his house. Finally one summer day in 1988, he rolled the plane out onto the freshly cut landing strip and took off.

"That first time was a real rush," Everett said. "No doubt about it."

It didn't take long for Everett to become known all the way to Milo and beyond as the man who, several times each summer, would suddenly appear a few hundred feet above the treetops in what looked like a scene straight out of "The Great Waldo Pepper." And if it wasn't Everett up there, it was his good friend Buddy Daggett, who landed on aircraft carriers in the waning days of World War II and now flies pretty much anything he can get his hands on.

"It was a great little plane," said Buddy, 81, who just last summer circled Milo's Fourth of July parade in the biplane with a large American flag in tow. "It did stall on me once, though."

Really" In mid-air"

"Yep," Buddy replied.

And you got down safely"

"Yep. Fortunately, I was right over an airfield at the time."

And why did it stall"

Buddy flashed a mischievous smile.

"Because I was flying upside-down," he said. "I had to put her down pretty quick."

If only Everett had been so lucky.

It was the evening of June 24. Lee was down visiting her father in Portland and Everett decided it was high time he took out the Renegade II for its first flight of the season.

He took off from the strip, climbed to about 1,500 feet and headed for another blueberry farm he owns a few miles down Route 11. He landed there, checked things out, and took off again toward home.

"I don't know what happened," he said. "It started running real rough."

He knew from his training and countless hours aloft that, above all, he needed to keep the engine running. He nursed the plane along, telling himself, "Maybe I can limp home."

His house and landing strip, which sit atop a sizable hill, appeared on the horizon. Losing altitude fast, Everett's biggest worry was that his wheels might clip one of the trees on his approach. If he could just hold on

"Then it just finally quit," Everett said. "It wasn't a good situation. This was not a plane that could glide."

Less than 100 yards from the landing strip, his wheels snagged a 150-foot poplar tree. Like an arresting cable on an aircraft carrier, the tree bent but didn't break under the 800-pound load. Everettopened his eyes as the biplane stopped and looked down in amazement. He'd landed in a tree.

"So I'm stopped," he said, looking up at the tree. "And I'm up there looking out at the field and I'm saying to myself, 'This isn't bad. When I calm down, I'll unharness myself and climb down.'"

Long pause.

"Then I got a real surprise," Everett finally said.

The tree, bent over almost 90 degrees, began to unbend. Everett felt him and his biplane move upward and backward. The next thing he knew he was headed, nose down, to the ground.

His forehead hit the dashboard on impact, breaking his nose and a tooth. He also broke a rib. Then, as he fumbled with his three-point harness, he took off his goggles to see better.

"That's when I saw the fire coming around the firewall," he said.

Somehow

"I stood here and watched it burn for a few minutes. I was a little worried it might spread through the woods," Everett said. "Then I heard the sirens."

Bertha Lyford, Everett's next-door neighbor, had just returned from a day at Moosehead Lake and was out back in her pasture tending to her horses when she saw Everett's biplane coming in over the trees. She thought nothing of it until she heard the crash.

Then, as she headed back toward her house in her pickup to call 911, she saw the black smoke.

"I knew there was nothing I could do," said Bertha, who at 65 was no match for flaming wreckage. So she drove up to the landing strip and waited for the police and rescue to arrive from Milo.

"Then I saw Everett come walking across the field," Bertha said. "I couldn't believe it. I walked up to him and said, 'My gosh, Everett!'"

Life in these parts is hardly worth living without a good emergency scanner. So even as the first crews arrived on the scene, word was already spreading that Everett had gone down. It was big news for everyone

"I was pretty bloody," he said. "I just wanted to get down to the house and get everybody calmed down."

And then let the rescue crew take him to the hospital"

"They wanted to," Everett said. "But I told them that as far as I could tell I had a broken nose and I lost a tooth. And I didn't need to go all the way to Dover Foxcroft so I could sit there while they watched me and did nothing for three hours."

Only later would Everett take off his jeans and realize that what he thought was an abrasion on his lower right leg was in fact a nasty third-degree burn. And by the next morning, the broken rib was making its presence known.

But the real tragedy here isn't Everett's injuries, which are in various stages of healing. It's the burned and twisted wreckage up in his woods that will never fly again.

"No way," said Dwight Russell, who actually restores wrecked airplanes in the "factory" out behind his house in Milo and helped Everett build the biplane. "That would be a total loss. There will be no rebuilding that airplane."

Hence Everett's dilemma. And Buddy's too, for that matter. The northern Maine sky still beckons, but they no longer have a way to get up there.

Last week, inspectors from the Federal Aviation Administration came by for the second time since the crash and told Everett that his medical records checked out OK but he was apparently behind in his annual in-flight certification. His slap-on-the-wrist punishment: A letter of reprimand that will stay in his file for two years providedhe successfully completes the flying test.

But how"

The Murphy Renegade II kit currently goes for about $25,000 and Everett isn't sure he can afford to do this all over again.

But he's weighing his options. He might start buying lottery tickets. Or he might find a way to cash in on what he calls "the poor farmer's sob story."

"I could go up there and cut what's left up into tiny little pieces," Everett said, tongue planted firmly in cheek. "Then I could put them in little plastic bags and sell them to people as pieces of the famous plane crash."

A crazy idea, to be sure.

But you never know

Columnist Bill Nemitz can be contacted at 791-6323 or at: