Cheat Mountain plane crash remembered

Jan. 11--This story about grief, and of what three generations of a family made with theirs, begins with an image of trees and tragedy.

Trees were the last things passengers of Pennsylvania-Central Airlines Flight 142 likely saw in the final, fateful minutes before the plane crashed into the sid e of Cheat Mountain, on April 14, 1945.

A lightning storm was raging over nearby Coopers Rock State Forest at the time of the crash, and skies were raggedly overcast everywhere else.

The DC-3 began going down while its pilots were attempting a landing at Hart Field.

It was right before 5 p.m., when the plane became unstable as it skimmed a ridge top on the mountain around 7 miles northeast of Morgantown. That meant it was also 7 miles off-course, from both the clouds and ground fog that began socking the area.

Wings and engines disintegrated as the craft bellied in and burst into flames, killing all 17 passengers and three crew members on board.

One of them was Laura Taber Barbour, a Philadelphia native and the wife of a minister in Knoxville, Tenn., who was visiting her parents back home.

She left behind her husband, the Rev. Clifford E. Barbour, and their son and only child, Cliff Jr., who was 17 at the time of the crash.

Ten days later, the congregants of Second Presbyterian Church sat rapt in their pews as the reverend took to the pulpit to deliver his first sermon after his wife's death.

He didn't mention her name once. He didn't have to.

He did talk about a comforting letter penned by a "friend from the north" -- Barbour hailed from Pittsburgh -- that set him thinking about faith in times of joy and tragedy, he told his hushed audience.

If the father and his son were suffering, they obviously weren't the only ones, he said.

Not with what else was going on in the world during a time when April could be the cruelest month.

Empathy for others was the point of his sermon, even as he was mourning the woman he loved.

World War II was in its waning days, but that April, sons, husbands and fathers were still dying on the battlefields and in the POW camps on shores across the Atlantic and Pacific.

And because other people were still hurting, the best way to prop them up, Barbour preached, was by a literal show of faith.

"A light burning only for itself soon dies," he said.

"A candle must be put on a candlestick to give light to all that are in the house. Then, and then only, does it become satisfying unto itself. ..."

Flight plan

Faith is often administered in the form of a dose of preventive medicine, the reverend reasoned later. Investigators from the Civil Aeronautics Board attributed the crash of Flight 142 to pilot error.

That's why, in 1956, he and his son used the money from the insurance settlement to start the Laura Taber Barbour Air Safety Award.

The award annually recognizes those people across the world -- everyone from advocates to inventors -- who work to make cruising at 35,000 feet, then touching down, that much safer.

"Creating the award was especially meaningful to my father," Cliff Barbour Jr., said last week, from his home in Knoxville.

"He did that for my mother," the reverend's son said, "but he also did that for the families who lost people they loved in the crash. He just wanted people to be safe."

Cliff Barbour Jr., is a retired businessman, who, at age 88, still enjoys a good, brisk hike to clear his head. Which also vectors in to this story.

If it works out, Cliff Jr., and his son, Philip Barbour, a filmmaker who runs his own advertising agency in Birmingham, Ala., just might trek to Cheat Mountain sometime this summer.

They want to go to the crash site -- if they can pinpoint it and they're actually able to get there -- to place a memorial of some sort for Laura and everyone else who died on that April day of dicey weather 71 years ago.

"Well, I've gone up a mountain or two in my time," the elder Barbour said. "So, we'll see."

Right now, Philip Barbour said, "We'll see," is becoming a pretty tall order. The 12-page report filed by crash investigators is just as precise -- as it isn't.

He knows from the report that the plane carrying his grandmother and 19 others was descending at a rate of about 330 feet a minute -- based on the severed treetops -- and banked slightly to right at the point of impact.

He knows that the site is somewhere near of top of a ridge about 2,100 feet up on the western side of the mountain.

As said, there was the report of the wings and engines being sheared by the trees.

Flight 142, investigators said, slammed in about 160 feet from where it first hit the treetops -- then slid another 240 feet before the explosion and fire that took the cabin, cockpit and most of the fuselage.

Seven decades later, and the words, "about" and "approximately" cut a pretty broad swath in an area likely reclaimed by the trees initially taken the plane's final descent, Philip Barbour said.

He's worked with Google Earth and other photographs and topographical maps, he said. He's also done searches through the National Archives and National Transportation Safety Board.

He needs an exact fix.

"What I'm really hoping is that we can find somebody who's still around who saw the crash or knows the area [where the plane went down]," he said.

"Then we have to hope that we can actually get there, and that my dad can make it," he said.

Visit http://ltbaward.org/ for more information on the award and its past recipients.

In the meantime, local historians or other residents who might be able to help are asked to call him at 205-939-1700, he said.

"We'd be grateful."

Wheels up

He started thinking about the West Virginia quest a few years ago, he said. It took his father several months to come around to the vision.

"I said, 'What if I found the site? Would you consider going there?' "

Cliff Barbour Jr.: "I thought about it for a while and said, 'Maybe I should.' This is something I should have done decades ago."

The Rev. Clifford Barbour died in 1979, having lived long enough to feel gratified many times over by the air industry's embracement of the award that carries Laura's name.

If his son gets to stand on that slope of Cheat Mountain, he'll look for an artifact or two, so he can have a sense of place and moment to go with the memory of Laura Tabor Barbour.

"She was a quality person," he said. "She loved her husband and her son. And she had this keen sense of humor that I got from her."

Leaning into that mountain, he said, doesn't just mean ending a key chapter in a story that started in 1945.

It means marking his father for his strength, character and inner light.

It was the light of faith, he said, that got the Rev. Clifford Barbour home ... even as his heart was off-course and falling.

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(c)2016 The Dominion Post (Morgantown, W.Va.)

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