Today we went for a hike to the Calloway Peak via Daniel Boone trail. You start on the Blue Ridge Parkway and it takes you about 3.5 miles all the way to the top, fairly strenuous hike. Almost at the end of the hike if you pay attention you’ll see broken parts of the single engine plane. It crashed here in 1978. I’m not sure if pilot survived or not, if you like to know you can Bing it and find out. It was interesting to see the wreckage pattern. We saw the parts in the dense forest and went to look at it, we found two airplane wings. Each wing had a big dent, from impact of the trees. We saw some other smaller aluminum parts, but none looked big enough for the actual body. After some searching we came to discover fuselage of the plane. It was probably about 50-70 feet away from the wings. Pretty bad site and a lot of damage. Here you go, see it for yourself.
The cause of this accident was controlled flight into terrain. A VFR rated pilot flew into IMC conditions. Here is the link to the NTSB summary of the report. http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief.asp?ev_id=42026&key=0
It was a fatal accident. Unfortunately, this kind of accident happens all too frequently.
Here’s a better link on the accident:
http://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/wiki.php?id=8003
Pilot name was phillip Dupre brother of Herman dupre who was at one time the owner of seven springs resort.