Outdoor Leadership students to participate in plane recovery mission

BRYSON CITY - Later this month, a team of several students and faculty members from Southwestern Community College's Outdoor Leadership program will trudge through a seldom-visited section of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

They won't just be hiking for fun or checking out new trails. This group is going into largely uncharted territory to recover wreckage from an air force jet that crashed more than nine years ago.

Led by Paul Wolf, coordinator of the Outdoor Leadership program, and Peter Grant, an instructor who initially discovered the wreckage, the team of six students will have two missions: 1.) to retrieve a Pratt & Whitney turbine core from an F-15 jet engine and 2.) to put into practice the land navigation and other skills they have been developing in class at SCC.

"This is an excellent opportunity to give our students some experiential learning," said Wolf, who has overseen SCC's program since it originated last fall. "We're tapping into a field called 'Aviation Archaeology' that has become quite a science in recent years. We will be going in as volunteers, sanctioned by the park, to go in and recover this engine. It's an exciting and unique opportunity for our students to actually go into the field and put their skills to work."

The F-15 remnant they will be pursuing is from one of several crash sites in the Great Smoky Mountains. The wreckage was first found by Grant, an avid outdoorsman who was mapping out a desolate section of the park as a hobby. During one trip to the area, the specific location of which will not be disclosed for security purposes, Grant discovered a large, metallic object perched in a creek.

He took several close-up photos of the numbers and markings on it. Some intense research revealed that the object is one of two turbine cores from an F-15 that had collided with an identical plane during a training exercise on Jan. 15, 1992. The pilot from one plane was able to maneuver his aircraft back to McGhee Tyson Air Base in Knoxville, Tenn., but the other pilot was forced to eject while his $30 million aircraft slammed into a mountainside.

"When Peter brought this information in, we got to looking into it and were very surprised to find out there were that many planes documented to have gone down in the Great Smokies," Wolf said. "The park is part of a wider mountainous training area that the air force has code-named Snowbird, which is a desirable area because of its unique and difficult terrain."

The recovery effort will take the team from SCC into what Wolf said would be 'very dangerous conditions for anyone who hasn't been trained for them."

Equipped with the necessary training and equipment, Wolf and the rest of SCC's recovery unit will set up base camp downstream from the point where Grant and Wolf last saw the engine piece. The wreckage has slowly been carried downhill by the stream it lies in, and Wolf said there is no way to be certain how much further it may have been carried since they last saw it.

There is no way to be certain how heavy the engine part is, but Wolf estimates it weighs in excess of 300 pounds —a weight that will present the team with a critical challenge considering the terrain is treacherous even for an outdoorsman carrying nothing.

"Utilizing advanced rope skills and techniques, our goals will be to move the object as far down as possible so that we can eventually get it to the trailhead.," Wolf said. "But a lot of it will depend on the conditions those days that we're out there. If it rains a lot, we'll have a harder time making progress. But our main objective in this is to give our students some real world experience. We also want to cultivate our relationship with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park because it is right here in our backyard, and it's a natural place for our students to get this kind of experience. It's a fantastic fit -we have students who need to gain experience by undertaking projects that the park may not have the resources to do itself."

The Outdoor Leadership program started up at SCC last fall and is the first associate's degree program of its kind in the state. It combines technical skills related to outdoor activites with a foundation of general education, business and computer skills that will allow graduates to find employment in leadership positions with outdoor activities in the region.