HIGH POINT CONFIDENTIAL: Plane crash killed two student pilots in 1939

Jul. 9—HIGH POINT — Jan. 23, 1939, should've been a big day for George Willis, a 20-year-old student pilot from High Point who was scheduled to earn his private pilot's license that day.

Instead, his family members spent the day planning the young man's funeral.

The day before, a Sunday, Willis and another student pilot — 32-year-old Roy Ridge, also of High Point — had taken off from Ragan Field, just south of the city on the Asheboro Road. With Willis at the controls, the idea was to get him a little more time in the cockpit before he went for his license on Monday.

Unfortunately, tragedy struck, and the two aviators never made it back to the small airfield.

It happened around 3 p.m., only minutes after the small Curtiss Robin monoplane they co-owned had lifted off. At approximately 1,800 feet, Willis banked to turn, but high, gusty winds grabbed the light, two-passenger plane and ripped off one of its wings. The plane quickly inverted, went into a barrel roll and plummeted back to earth, slamming into a field along the Asheboro Road.

The plane's gas tank was found about a hundred yards from the wreckage, and searchers would later find the sheared wing about a mile away from the crash site, according to a front-page article in the next day's High Point Enterprise.

Willis and Ridge both sustained fatal injuries, their bodies having been badly mangled from the impact of the crash.

Because bad news travels fast, word of the tragedy spread quickly across High Point and to other nearby communities. Within an hour, the crash site was overrun with gawkers and rubberneckers who had come to see the ruins of the plane for themselves. Some of them can be seen in a photo of the wreckage that was published in The Enterprise.

The onlookers grew so numerous, in fact — more than a thousand, according to The Enterprise — that a few High Point traffic officers and N.C. Highway Patrolmen had to be called to the scene to direct traffic and manage the crowd.

In the wake of the crash, discussion eventually turned to one pressing question: Should Willis and Ridge have been flying that afternoon? The winds were turbulent, and the plane was small and lightweight.

John Lohr, manager of the airfield, acknowledged that the weather was problematic.

"It was bad flying weather, Mr. Lohr said, but the plane was in perfect mechanical condition when it left Ragan Field," The Enterprise reported. "It had just been checked over."

Perhaps so, but a card found in the wreckage of the plane indicated its license had expired a week earlier and was due for reinspection.

Also troubling was the fact that Ridge should not have been in the plane with Willis, no matter how skilled he was at the controls.

"(Willis) was described as a capable flier," The Enterprise reported. "Lewis McGinnis, manager of the Winston-Salem airport, where the plane had been stored, however, said that neither Willis nor Ridge had a license which would permit him to fly with a passenger."

Willis, of course, was scheduled to get such a license the very next day, but tomorrow never came ... for either of them.

jtomlin@hpenews.com — 336-888-3579