Tom Maloney sat in the office of his Laguna Niguel home one day, about five years ago, perusing – through wire-rimmed glasses – a cache of digital newspaper archives.
Maloney, a retired park ranger, had done this many times before, part of his hobby as an amateur tracker of crashed airplanes. But on this day, he stumbled upon an old Los Angeles Times clipping that told an unfamiliar story.
It was some 50 years ago. Wintertime. Somewhere along a gas maintenance road in the Mojave Desert. It was then and there, the black-and-white newsprint said, that a plane carrying two people crashed.
The pilot and passenger survived. But the loss of the aging plane, which had once circled the globe, was itself cause for mourning.
By the time Maloney came across the news clipping, he’d been on the hunt for airplane crash sites for nearly 15 years. Yet, he had been unaware of the aircraft described in the article – or of its history-making pilot.
Maloney read on.
On that chilly, clear Saturday in January 1965, as recounted in the serif text on Maloney’s screen, Joan Merriam Smith bid farewell to the plane she named “City of Long Beach,” in homage to her chosen city.
But before she could say goodbye to her cherished plane, Smith had to escape it.
A malfunction forced the plane into an emergency landing. It collided with the desert floor, skidded and swerved – the propellers tearing at the ground. Smith hit her head and briefly blacked out, forcing a man named William Etchison – who piloted the plane that day – to drag her to safety.
When she came to, Smith watched flames consume her ship.
The craft’s mainplane and stabilizer somehow withstood the flames – barely. They were sufficient to feature in a museum display dedicated to the plane’s global travels. Otherwise, though, the blaze left the red-and-white plane fatally charred.
The “City of Long Beach” would never see the skies again.
Over the ensuing decades, the remaining pieces would undertake their own journey into oblivion. They’d be scooped up – transferred or sold or auctioned – and eventually lost to the public. All records of their whereabouts have vanished.
And the tale of Smith and her beloved airplane has disappeared as well.
When Maloney discovered her legacy by chance, he also found a new mission. Maloney became determined to find – along with a group of other like-minded aviation aficionados, known as the Project Remembrance Team – whatever vestiges of Smith’s plane remained.
He hoped that, with their discovery, the team could resurrect the lost history of the first pilot to complete a solo equatorial trip around the world.
♦ ♦ ♦
I made up my mind that I wanted to be like her.
– Joan Smith
Smith came into the world as the woman who would become her idol disappeared from it.
She was born in Michigan, in August 1936, while Amelia Earhart, then a visiting faculty member at Indiana’s Purdue University, planned her now-legendary, ill-fated journey around the globe.
Smith, like Earhart, caught the flying bug early: It was 1952 and the 15-year-old’s father had just died; her mother decided the remaining family of two should relocate. So Smith boarded her first plane.
The Lockheed Constellation, operated by Eastern Airlines, left Detroit and headed for Miami. The airliner’s capacity was 80 passengers and five crew members. Its wings spanned 123 feet, and it weighed more than 27 tons while empty.
“I was terrified,” Smith wrote in a 1965 Saturday Evening Post article. “I had no idea that airplanes could be so big. I wondered how they could fly.”
But shortly after takeoff, Smith’s fear gave way to curiosity. She asked a flight attendant if she could visit the cockpit and watch the pilots at work.
It took 10 minutes to convert her.
“I was hooked on aviation,” she wrote.
She had been taking baton-twirling classes but persuaded her mother to pay instead for flying lessons.
“I’d won about 18 trophies with the baton by then, anyway,” Smith wrote, “and the challenge was gone. I’d found a new love.”
Smith’s devotion intensified after her aunt gifted her a copy of Earhart’s book, “Last Flight,” published shortly after she disappeared. Smith devoured it.
“From that moment on,” she wrote, “I made up my mind that I wanted to be like her.”
In 1937, Earhart, along with her navigator, Fred Noonan, attempted to circle the globe at the equator. Over six weeks, the duo flew 22,000 miles around the equator.
They took off from Lae, New Guinea, en route to Howland Island, with only 6,000 miles left on the trip. And then they vanished.
Smith, at age 16, set her sights on one day completing that expedition.
The young pilot flew a plane solo before she got her driver’s license. She earned her private pilot’s license at 17 – the youngest age of eligibility – and then her commercial license at 23, becoming the first woman to receive one at the minimum age.
She worked as an instructor and flew charter and executive flights, saving up cash to one day purchase her own plane – and finish Earhart’s around-the-world journey.
♦ ♦ ♦
More than a decade before Maloney found the old newsprint, he sat in his office in the Aliso and Wood Canyons Wilderness Park when a broad-shouldered man walked through his doorway.
The man, Pat Macha, was a history and geography teacher at Hawthorne High School, with a penchant for finding plane crash sites.
Macha asked Maloney whether he knew of any such sites nearby.
“Funny you should ask,” Maloney responded.
The park ranger pulled from under his desk a cardboard box filled with pieces of blue metal, some of which bore serial numbers and manufacturer initials on them.
“His eyes grew as big as saucers,” Maloney recalled.
Maloney hadn’t been able to identify the plane, but Macha found clues in the debris. The initials VS told him it was a Vought-Sikorsky aircraft. The shade of blue had only been used by the United States Marine Corps for a limited time; Macha could check his records for those dates and the geographical area to find the specific plane.
He later solved the puzzle: It was an F4U Corsair, a type of fighter bomber that had been used in World War II and the Korean War.
Maloney showed him the site, and Macha, along with his family, later discovered more remnants there.
During that first tour, Macha noted Maloney’s eye for out-of-place materials hidden in the landscape – a skill Maloney had honed while searching for arrowheads and other artifacts as part of his official duties. Macha later invited him on future adventures.
Maloney eventually racked up nearly 20 years of plane-hunting experience alongside Macha, though his resume will never compare to the now-retired teacher’s.
For Macha, who lives in Mission Viejo, the lifetime hobby began in 1963.
Macha, 17 years old at the time, was up in San Gorgonio Mountain, working as a cabin counselor at a summer camp, when he came across the remains of a Douglas C-47B transport once flown by the U.S. Air Force.
“Finding that first wreck by accident, I just wanted to know why it happened, when it happened and who was involved,” Macha said in a recent interview, “and that just started the ball rolling.”
Not long after that first find, Macha came across an article in the Los Angeles Times about the wreck of a plane that had flown around the world. He clipped the story and added it to a burgeoning pile of research.
It sat on a long list of crash sites for 50 years.
♦ ♦ ♦
Up here is another world and I belong to it.
– Joan Smith
Smith knew, the moment she glimpsed it, that this was the plane to complete the route Earhart had not:
A 1958 Piper Apache, registration number N3251P, with turbocharged twin-engines, weighing 2,280 pounds and boasting a 37-foot wingspan.
She used her life savings – $10,000 — for a down payment on the Piper Apache in November 1963, the same year Macha discovered his first wreckage site.
Smith quickly accrued another $35,000 in expenses to prepare the plane – which she nicknamed 51-Poppa, referencing the last three characters of its registration number – for the global journey.
Unable to bear the cost of the trip alone, Smith sought sponsors.
Piper Aircraft declined, citing the plane’s poor condition.
Others, however, were more optimistic.
By then, Smith, along with her husband, Jack, lived on Garford Street, just east of Long Beach’s Traffic Circle. She won the support of folks in her adopted city. Those who agreed to pay for the flight included Long Beach’s own Buffums department store, the Long Beach Chamber of Commerce and the city itself.
The City Council voted just a week-and-a-half before her departure to offer $1,500 (or roughly $12,500 today), which private funds matched.
Smith gave her plane its name to recognize the final contribution and painted “Long Beach Lady” across the nose.
Smith geared up for the journey. She packed a two-man life raft, a life vest, survival equipment for all biomes, 28 manila envelopes with 105 navigation charts, a sextant, Life Savers candy, Metrecal cookies, a 22-caliber gun, two thermoses, a 33-mm camera, a passport and 16 visas, a tape recorder, two pairs of sunglasses, $3,000 in traveler’s checks, a small suitcase with three outfits, extra gas tanks and a copy of Earhart’s “Last Flight.”
Smith also brought her good luck charm: a 4-inch stuffed koala bear made of kangaroo fur.
Earlier this year, a communications professional named Tiffany Ann Brown published a book, “Fate on a Folded Wing,” chronicling Smith’s flight. Brown undertook the project after finding an unfinished manuscript by her grandmother, Trixie-Ann Schubert – a journalist and friend of Smith’s – who died, along with her aviatrix pal, in a 1965 plane crash.
The book recorded another critical item Smith brought on her journey: a box of sick bags, which she procured from a man at Medina Aircraft, in Long Beach, before the flight.
“Did you say a whole box, Joan?” Smith later recalled him asking, according to the book.
“Right,” she responded.
The man asked if she maybe wanted 10 or 15. When she insisted on a whole box, he asked if she planned “to be air sick all the time or something.”
“I don’t plan to be air sick at all,” Smith responded. “Now may I have them?”
He relented.
Though she didn’t explain her reasoning to him, she later noted that it was the only way she could think to urinate while in the air.
“Male pilots could use rubber tubes,” she recalled later on, “a highly impractical system for women.”
With that, she had all the necessities for a woman blazing her own trail. Smith was ready.
Though Smith lived in Long Beach, she intended to follow Earhart’s equatorial route as closely as she could: She’d start in Oakland and fly east across the continental United States, then stop in Puerto Rico, Suriname, Brazil, Senegal, Mali, Chad, Sudan, Pakistan, India, Burma (now called Myanmar), Thailand, Indonesia, Australia and New Guinea.
Next, she would span a distance Earhart planned but never completed; rather than touching down in Howland Island, Smith would stop in Guam, Wake Island, Honolulu and back to Oakland.
St. Patrick’s Day, 1964, was off to a foggy start in the city just east of the San Francisco Bay.
Smith’s plane sat in the same Oakland hangar, No. 22, from which Earhart embarked on her first circumnavigation attempt 27 years before, to the day.
At 1 p.m., Smith took off from Runway 27 Right, “a long, slick jet-age strip,” she later noted, “near the now-vanished dirt strip Amelia had used.”
Smith launched into the sky. As she did, the pioneer soaked in all she could. She noticed the snow-capped Sierras to the left and the seaside grids of roads and buildings comprising her former city of Monterey to the right.
“I’m on my way at last, after all the planning and preparation,” Smith thought. “I’m on my way. It is good, for a change, to be alone.
“Up here is another world,” she added, “and I belong to it.”
♦ ♦ ♦
That devotion to the skies would be tested.
Smith dodged bits of weather and stayed at about 5,000 feet for the first couple of hours after leaving Natal, Brazil, to make her way across the Atlantic Ocean. Then torrential rains poured down; she couldn’t see anything beyond the flood.
The water, at one point, pushed so hard against the plane that it leaked through the windshield and the bottom of the door.
Smith could no longer hear her radio loudspeaker over the downpour.
She worried the pressure would become so forceful the windshield would break.
Smith tried getting above the storm. She climbed to 9,000 feet, then 13,000 feet – but it was no use.
“I could never seem to get high enough,” she wrote later.
So, for two hours, she hovered between 400 and 500 feet above the water “through a blurry, messy deluge.”
Smith clenched the control yoke and relied on her instruments not to lead her astray for 150 miles before emerging, at last, on the other side of the intertropical front.
She still had five hours to go, she estimated, before she would see the African continent.
She continued on and then, suddenly, the silence in the cockpit broke. Smith caught a radio transmission asking the crew in Dakar, Senegal – her next stop – whether anyone had heard from her. She repeatedly yelled into the microphone.
But – likely due to rough atmospheric conditions – no one heard her.
Smith still faced hours of exhaustion and loneliness before she would see anything but ocean.
“Once day turns into night,” she said, “I’m intrigued to see the sea, sky and horizon all collapse into a single, starless, black void.”
Her back ached; her head throbbed; her leg cramped. She tried again and again to reach someone, anyone, on the emergency frequency. But nothing.
Smith could hear folks in Natal and Dakar asking for her location. They spoke to each other, noting her last known location and the amount of fuel she had on board. She tried to respond, but they couldn’t hear her.
After 20 minutes, the calls stopped.
“It was a terrible feeling,” she later said, “like there was some barrier between me and the people who were trying to help me.”
It was, she said, “like hearing my own obituary.”
♦ ♦ ♦
In the years since Macha found that first crash site on San Gorgonio Mountain, his garage, in Mission Viejo, has become an office dedicated to his aviation pastime.
A topographical map of Southern California, littered with multi-colored pins, dominates the room’s western wall. Each pin notes the location of a plane crash Macha has identified. He lost count after 800.
Letters, awards and model airplanes surround the framed map, hanging above a gray desk.
Rows of metal bookshelves – stretching nearly to the ceiling and filled with binders – stand behind the desk. Paper labels, with blue and black handwriting, are taped to each spine, identifying the geographical area and the years the binder’s pages encompass.
“Do we have everything that ever happened? No,” Macha told the Southern California News Group near summer’s end. “So it’s an ongoing acquisition.”
Still, the collection is large enough that its curator, at age 74, worries for its future. Neither the American Aviation Historical Society nor the Western Museum of Flight have the space for it; the San Diego Air and Space Museum might take it, Macha said, but there, it may just sit in a metal box.
“We’d like to preserve the history if possible,” Macha said, “and aviation accidents are a part of aerospace history.”
So, for now, Macha focuses on building up that history.
Over the years, he’s compiled a group of more than a dozen people, like Maloney, to help with that mission: the Project Remembrance Team.
The organization uses reports from the National Transportation Safety Board, newspaper clippings, accounts from local aviation groups – whatever its members can get their hands on.
Smith’s wreck, for example, stayed untouched on the retired teacher’s list until Maloney found the digital file of the same news clipping Macha found a half-century earlier.
Yet even then, the time for an ambitious hunt hadn’t arrived.
The Project Remembrance crew looked into it, but couldn’t find much, except for a brief Civil Aeronautics Board report on the incident.
Once again, the team’s members decided, the crash would return to the growing backlog of sites to eventually find.
Maloney, though, kept digging.
“I just wouldn’t let it go to sleep,” he said. “I’d say, ‘Oh, here’s a little bit more information. And here’s a little more.’”
Eventually, as the Project Remembrance Team grew, more members worked to find whatever information they could on Smith.
Dave Mihalik, a retired law enforcement officer who served in the Air Force, found more newspaper and magazine articles about the aviatrix, along with some photos.
By spring this year, Maloney said, the group felt it had enough information “to mount an expeditionary force.”
And so on a cool Wednesday morning in May, before dawn broke, a sextet of Project Remembrance members piled into their trucks, drove away from their Orange County homes and headed into the desert.
♦ ♦ ♦
Smith’s bearing as she traversed the Atlantic was “off and erratic.” She began to fear an end similar to Earhart.
It was possible, she later recalled thinking, that she was flying in circles without knowing it and would eventually run out of gas. She was deathly afraid of sharks, and, she wrote, “the last thing I want is to end up down there in the water with them.”
Smith was prepared to ditch her plane if necessary – she packed a life raft, after all – but she was not confident she could accomplish the task under the circumstances.
“The thought of a night ditching terrifies me,” she said. “I’ve never ditched an airplane, but I feel I’d have a chance during the daytime. Not at night.”
But she was running low on water, and had only eaten half a box of Metrecal cookies and a few Life Savers candies throughout the flight. She thought about that life raft, stored on top of the gas tank behind her, and wondered how long she could drift on it while maintaining her sanity.
Around hour 15, she figured, unless some wild miscalculation had occurred, she had to be close. She turned on a short-range homing device, the needle of which should point her in the right direction once she was within 150 miles of her destination.
After 10 minutes, it did just that. Smith was 40 miles north of Dakar.
She corrected course and soon saw lights in the distance.
“Well,” she said to herself, “I’ve lucked out again.”
♦ ♦ ♦
The Project Remembrance Team set out to find “The City of Long Beach” in May, in a pair of Toyota pickup trucks.
The team drove north, winding through suburban Orange County and into the Inland Empire. As the sun peeked above the horizon, the men traveled through Cajon Pass. The San Gabriel Mountains stood to the left, and the San Bernardino range loomed to the right.
Soon enough, the Mojave Freeway steered them into the desert.
Billboards advertised car dealerships, bluegrass festivals and custom houses on half-acre lots. Looking to the east, neighborhoods, freshly risen from the sandy earth, crawled ever closer to the highway.
The six crash-site hunters had read enough newspaper articles to know 51-Poppa’s remains were in the vicinity of Lucerne Valley. They exited toward Apple Valley and took a right onto Bear Valley Road, following it as it veered into State Route 18.
The crew then made what they would later learn was a crucial mistake: They turned left onto State Route 247 and headed north.
Though they stayed, for the most part, on paved roads, the team occasionally turned onto dusty trails to the east and west to inspect as many gas maintenance roads as they could find.
The team scoured at least half a dozen locations that day in the vast expanse of territory controlled by the Bureau of Land Management.
But none of them were quite right. The gravel was too dark and the rocks too volcanic to mirror the lighter tints in historical photos.
The bigger picture was also off. Photos from the time seemed to show a ridge not far beyond the plane’s wreckage. Everywhere the Project Remembrance Team looked, the hills were too far away.
After two-and-a-half hours, the men surrendered.
“We failed,” Maloney said, “but at least we knew where it wasn’t.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Smith approached the West Coast as the sun rose, 36 days after landing in Dakar. She flipped on her radio – and heard premature applause.
They didn’t know, after all, that her right fuel tank was depleted and her left tank was beginning to overheat. She would soon have to shut it down.
The final legs of Smith’s odyssey were no kinder to her than the early stages. The wind across New Guinea, from Port Moresby to Lae, was so strong, it stripped paint and decals off 51-Poppa. Later, as she left Guam, weather delayed her and forced her to divert, adding another stop to her already lengthy itinerary.
“It almost seems as if Amelia Earhart was resenting anyone following her path,” her publicist said midway through Smith’s trip, “and is throwing the book at Joan to delay and harass.”
On her final leg, Smith had trouble with her landing gear and noticed the right engine was eating more fuel than usual.
On that early May morning, with Oakland in her sights, Smith decided to stay the course and focus on saving fuel.
So, Brown wrote in her 2019 book, Smith “did something that she had never done before in her 11 years of flying: she called for an escort to the coast.”
A U.S. Coast Guard search-and-rescue plane appeared. Smith flipped her right engine on, to give her extra power to land.
Finally, she touched down in Oakland.
Smith received a heroine’s welcome. She’d become the first person to circle the world solo at the equator.
♦ ♦ ♦
Failure did not deter them.
After their May attempt, Macha’s son, Patric Joseph Macha, employed a different method to pinpoint 51-Poppa’s location: Google Earth. He used the program to look for geologic features matching an old photo Mihalik had found, which showed the “City of Long Beach” wreckage in front of an unidentified mountain range.
The junior Macha paid particular attention to a grouping of dark and light marks on a hill in the background. After hours of combing Google Earth images of the Lucerne Valley region, he found a spot that matched those markings perfectly.
He ran it by other members of the group and they all agreed: The Project Remembrance Team finally had a solid lead.
In late June, the team once again set out before dawn to find Smith’s beloved plane.
This time, they went the opposite way on State Route 247 – rather than the northern route they attempted two months earlier – and then turned left onto a cracked-asphalt road that gave way to tawny gravel.
Dust devils whipped through the landscape as they drove through Tyler Valley.
Yet, hints of civilization remained: a lone plastic water bottle, without label or cap, rolled into the roadway. A red and black sign warned Spanish-speakers, “Peligro – tubería de gas.”
The road grew rougher each mile. As the team approached the site, a AAA map of San Bernardino County dislodged from the center tray on Maloney’s dashboard. It bumped its way across the surface and fell to the passenger-side floor.
Then, the team stopped. It’d arrived at the location the younger Macha had pinpointed on Google Earth.
They searched for half an hour. Then Maloney spotted it: a melted piece of aluminum, complete with one telltale sign.
“Rivets,” Maloney said. “That’s what we like to see. If there are rivets, then we know: aircraft.”
The team soon discovered an engine mount. Then an avionics switch. A hydraulic fitting.
“It’s like evidence of a treasure,” Maloney later said. “We’re on the spot. We found what we’re looking for.”
♦ ♦ ♦
For all practical purposes, 51-Poppa is gone.
– Joan Smith
Smith settled back to her life in Long Beach, having made history. But she still owed more than $17,000 on the plane.
Three museums expressed interest in the aircraft, but they would only accept it as a donation. Smith had to find a solution that would help her pay it off.
She wavered over whether to sell it.
Eventually, however, Smith found an offer she was happy with.
The Lorraine Limestone Company, based in Tehachapi, said it would pay her to fly 51-Poppa on a monthly basis to Alaska, Ecuador and Peru.
“After you fly it six months with us and get the bulk of it paid off,” a company executive, William Etchison, told her, “it’s yours again to put in some museum.”
That fate would arrive sooner than either of them expected.
In January 1965, she received a call from Etchison. He was in Las Vegas and asked if she’d fly out there and ferry him to Long Beach.
An hour into the flight back to the coast – with Etchison sitting in the pilot’s seat – the duo whiffed a strong dose of gasoline fumes.
Not long after, according to an article Smith published in “The AOPA Pilot Magazine,” a scent “similar to that of an electric iron burning” wafted through the plane.
Then came the smoke.
Smith tried in vain to find the smoke’s source. She shut off 51-Poppa’s gas valve. And its heater. And the master switch. Heat radiated from around the vent ducts and rudder pedals; the odor grew more and more acrid; the smoke intensified.
Etchison began coughing and opened up the side windows.
“A decision was made to get down and out immediately,” Smith wrote. “We could not take a chance with the gasoline fumes, which might ignite at any moment and end it all for us.”
Smith spent all of two minutes surveying the surrounding desert. Neither of the two nearest airports, Daggett and Apple Valley, were in sight. What she could see were mountain ranges not far ahead and dirt roads and valleys just below.
Etchison lowered the plane while Smith made three unanswered Mayday calls. Their eyes watered. Their lungs burned.
Smith adjusted her seat as far back as she could to get away from the heat.
Smith and Etchison decided they would open the door just before hitting the ground, providing a safe exit route.
They discussed the possibility of hitting rocks, cactus and yucca. They acknowledged the chance the plane would flip.
“The fear of an explosion, with the more than 75 gallons of gas remaining on board, raced through my mind,” Smith wrote. “A wheels-up landing would be the only answer on a rough desert road.”
Etchison brought the plane from 160 miles per hour down to 85. He followed a hilly, unpaved road until he saw a flat stretch. He slowed 51-Poppa to 80, 75, 70 miles an hour. Then he cut the power.
Smith opened the door and heard the last, “excruciating,” buzz-saw scream from her treasured plane.
Shortly after, while a doctor tended to her wounds at a nearby hospital, Smith lamented her loss.
“For all practical purposes,” she said, “51-Poppa is gone.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Though the plane’s flying days were over, its journey wasn’t done yet.
Portions of 51-Poppa’s body and tail – both still enveloped in the 40,000 autographs it gained from fans during its flight around the world – survived the fire. The site was quickly cleaned up, and plans to retire the aircraft to the Movieland of the Air Museum, at the Orange County Airport (now John Wayne Airport), quickened.
The museum, owned by acclaimed pilots Paul Mantz and Frank Tallman, had plans to create a display dedicated to Smith’s globe-circling flight. But it’s unclear if those plans ever manifested.
Mantz and Tallman’s joint company, Tallmantz Aviation, claimed the remaining parts soon after the crash and transported them to the Orange County Airport. But Mantz died in a crash of his own six months later, leaving the future of the company and the museum uncertain.
Records obtained by Scott Thompson, owner of Aero Vintage Books, show the company offered up the remnants of the Piper Apache in an auction three years after the crash, on May 29, 1968.
It’s unclear if anyone bought the fragments of 51-Poppa. Thompson’s documents don’t list a sales price or buyer for those items.
“This really does not mean much, because all the media interest at the time was about the whole aircraft, and not the parts that were also offered,” he said in an email. “I have not seen any final record of sales for all the lots of the auction.”
Tallmantz Aviation dissolved in 1986, and its records were later donated to the Margaret Herrick Library, in Beverly Hills.
The library’s Tallmantz files – in a nook dedicated to special collections, organized in dozens of manila folders – include handwritten scribbles, brittle carbon copies and postmarked letters of condolence. Some reference the “City of Long Beach” auction.
Soon after Mantz died, one document showed, a representative of the Naval Aviation Museum wrote to Tallman that he “heard a rumor that you are considering the disestablishment of your fine museum, and of course the break-up of your collection of historic aircraft.”
Tallman responded the following month.
“Unfortunately, you can well understand the immense value of our 90-odd aircraft,” he wrote, “and the fact that their acquisition has cost a great deal of sweat as well as money.
“Unfortunately,” Tallman continued, “my huge investment forces me to think first about my return.”
The Margaret Herrick Library does not contain any records showing whether 51-Poppa was ultimately sold or donated. If 51-Poppa somehow remained with the Movieland of the Air Museum, it almost certainly would have been sold, along with the rest of the collection, to Florida aircraft collector Kermit Weeks after the museum closed in 1985.
Weeks, though, said 51-Poppa “does not ring any bells with me.” The plane, he said he believed, was likely sold at the auction.
Rumors also exist in the world of aviation historians that Smith’s widower, Jack Smith, wound up with the plane.
But, Smith recently said, his last recollection of 51-Poppa was that it went to Mantz and Tallman’s museum.
The trail ends there. The remains of the “City of Long Beach,” it seems, are lost.
♦ ♦ ♦
It’s been lost in time. People don’t even know she had such a feat.
– Tom Maloney
And so, it appears, the last known vestiges of 51-Poppa, and of a historic journey too soon forgotten, remain somewhere along an obscure gas-maintenance road in the Mojave desertscape.
The dozen or so scraps of metal, identifiable only to those who know what to look for, can fit on a baking sheet.
The exact location, according to the Project Remembrance Team, should remain a mystery to the larger public. Its members fear crash-site scavengers coming for what little exists. It’s a real threat, they said, even though the few remaining pieces are shielded by the federal Archaeological Resources Protection Act.
As for how Smith might feel about her plane’s fate – or the fading of her life’s ambition from historical memory – it’s impossible to know. She died in another crash, near Big Pines, a little more than a month after 51-Poppa went down.
What is clear, from her own writings, is that the plane was more to her than just a metal tube; it was her partner in traveling Smith’s most sacred space: the sky.
“Losing this faithful Apache,” she later wrote, “was like losing a member of the family.”
The Project Remembrance Team, for its part, kept searching.
And in October, the team returned to the desert.
They widened the search, combing greasewood and young yucca plants yet again. But they found nothing more.
The few parts they had already identified, it seems, may truly be all that remains.
“I’m glad we found that one melted down piece,” Maloney said. “It tells the whole story: crashed and burned. The aluminum melted and everything else burned away – the fabric, everything.”
But Maloney and the rest of the crew haven’t given up hope that the bigger pieces of 51-Poppa could someday re-emerge.
“That tail section needs to be hanging up in a museum, with a big display of, ‘Here’s her route, and here’s her plane,’” he said. “It’s been lost in time. People don’t even know she had such a feat.”
For now, though, perhaps the resurrection of her story will suffice.
As members of the Project Remembrance Team piled back into their trucks that October day, the air was cool and clear, just as it had been one January day 54 years prior.
The sky was cloudless.
Just before they drove off, a jet far above drew one lone contrail.
The line in the sky ran parallel to the gas maintenance road where Etchison and Smith touched down all those years ago.
That plane, flight records later revealed, avoided 51-Poppa’s fate: It landed safely in Long Beach.
