Wreckage Found In September By Construction Crew

An aviation "cold case" has been solved, as skeletal remains found in the wreckage of a classic Bellanca found in September have been positively identified.

While news reports of the time had all but confirmed that it was 59-year old Max Weldon Schaeffer and his brother-in-law Eugene Carlton Goodrow who had gone down with the 1959 Bellanca Cruisemaster during an ice storm in the mountains of Washington state in 1983, no one could know for absolute certainty until the wreckage was found -- which it finally was, 22 years later, by a Yakima tribal crew installing telecommunications equipment near Satus Pass.

As was reported last September in Aero-News, Klickitat County search teams had to wait for a week before they got permission from the Yakima Nation to enter the reservation -- but once they did, they found the remains of two men.

Positive identification of the bodies took some time, but the victim's names were finally released Wednesday by Klickitat County Prosecutor-Coroner Timothy S. O'Neill. According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Schaeffer and Goodrow were the ones onboard the doomed Bellanca.

The men had taken off from Winthrop, on a trip home from Yakima, WA to Long Beach, CA on the morning of January 8, 1983. Although forecasters had warned of icing and severe turbulence through the pass, the men opted not to wait the storm out on the ground.

Formal release of the names was delayed also so that the men's families could be notified, according to O'Neill.

FMI: Read The NTSB Report