On November 28, 1995, 31 year old pilot Colin Campbell departed the Braxton County Airport in a small Cessna twin engine plane headed for Lynchburg, Virginia, on a flight path that crossed Webster County from the Northwest to the Southeast.
Sometime that morning around 9:40 a.m., Campbell crashed the plane in a heavily wooded area of the Monongahela National Forest on the Pocahontas County side of the border between Webster and Pocahontas counties near the Williams River. Campbell did not survive.
Led by the Webster County Emergency Services Office and countless volunteers, a search ensued the next day in heavy snow conditions. Dwayne McCourt was one of those volunteers. As he would later find out, he had walked within a 100 feet of the plane wreckage just a few days after the wreck, but never saw any sign of the plane or its pilot due to the heavy snow.
It took McCourt nearly six years to find the wreckage when he and John Reed, the then coroner and funeral home director, flew over the crash site in November, 2001 and spotted it. Local law enforcement and emergency authorities, along with McCourt and Reed, then made their way to the crash site the next day.
No sign of Campbell's body was ever located, although bits and pieces of his clothing were found next to the cockpit area of the wrecked plane. Authorities concluded after nearly six years, animals and decomposition eliminated any chance to find Campbell's remains. Nonetheless, McCourt's discovery provided some closure for Campbell's family.
The National Transportation Safety Board concluded that Campbell flew the plane into rising terrain. The wreckage was located almost in a straight line from the Braxton airport to Lynchburg. Campbell was likely flying in low clouds with his visibility obstructed by the impending snow storm and missed clearing the top of the mountain by just 200 feet (which mountain was the highest mountain in his flight path).
On November 22, 2001, the editor of the Commentator flew over the wreckage site and on November 23, 2001 hiked to the site, all of which is shown in the 20 minute video below (start video from beginning).
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