I don't think this video belongs in the "I Am Not Danica" post, but y'all know how confused I am right now. I'd say this is both history and current. A pretty good video.
Here's a video report from the Detroit, Michigan FOX News affiliate:
Commerce Twp. Couple Killed in North Carolina Plane Crash: MyFoxDET...
I did not know Mr. Bown, but prayers go out to he and his girlfriend's family and friends. According to the article he had been in Davidson County, NC on racing business. Davidson County is home to Richard Childress Racing.
Pilot had ties to racing industry; passenger was his girlfriend
Sunday, March 04, 2012 By Mark Wineka
The Salisbury Post
SALISBURY Divers recovered the body late Saturday morning of Steve Bown from the underwater wreckage of his Cessna 350 plane, which crashed Friday afternoon into High Rock Lake.
The recovery came at 11:42 a.m. when divers Pete Ressa and Chris Moroch located Bowns body in the planes fuselage 27 feet underwater and brought it back to the surface.
Karyn Martin also died in the Friday crash. Her body was recovered from the lake about an hour after the plane went down.
Bown, 51, was president of Performance Springs Inc. of New Hudson, Mich. The company, which produces valve springs for engines, has strong ties to the racing industry, including NASCAR.
He had been here (in Davidson County) on racing business, Rowan County Fire Marshal Tom Murphy said.
Murphy had no background information or age for Martin. A cousin of Bowns told the Post she was the businessmans girlfriend.
Both bodies were to be transported to the N.C. Medical Examiners Office in Chapel Hill.
The four-seat Cessna Columbia 350 took off from the Davidson County airport about 1:15 p.m. Friday, heading for Florida, and was in the air just minutes before crashing. The 25-foot-long plane has a wingspan of just more than 36 feet and a fixed landing gear.
The couple apparently had flown from Commerce Township, Mich., the day before and spent the night in Davidson County so Bown could conduct business.
A February Popular Mechanics article credited Performance Springs with producing the steel spring that revolutioned NASCAR by providing engines with increased power. The springs job is to keep an engine valve closed.
Performance Springs was founded in 1996, and Bown was lead engineer besides being the company president. The firm also provided springs for racing teams in IRL and NHRA Pro Stock.
The divers found Bowns body on their first dive into the water, and the recovery was made in roughly 12 minutes.
Rescue teams and divers had prepared for a long day, assembling at Tamarac Marina in Rowan County before boats went out to the marked crash site.
The plane went down in a wide part of the lake near Cow Island without ever issuing any kind of distress call.
Ressa, a Davie County Rescue Squad diver with 23 years of experience, credited the rescue operations organization for helping with the quick recovery of the body after heavy fog curtailed the search late Friday afternoon.
What we do, we do for the families, Ressa said. Its a necessary thing.
Moroch said the divers simply followed a fundamental rule: You plan your dive, and you dive your plan.
The National Transportation Safety Board, which did not yet have representatives on site, was to guide efforts to salvage the plane.
Ressa reported that a very large part of the plane is intact. He and Moroch, an independent diver out of Statesville, said they felt a main part of the fuselage, one wing and a horizontal stabilizer during their dive.
Visibility in the lake water was zero, Ressa said. Water temperature was 41 degrees.
Divers from Rowan County, Thomasville, Fair Grove Fire Department, Davie County and Davidson County were assembled and ready to go Saturday.
Liberty Fire Department personnel provided men and equipment throughout the day, and the American Red Cross again served food for the recovery participants.
Murphy said Saturdays primary mission was to find Bowns body.
Authorities here confirmed the couples identities at midnight Friday through the Michigan State Police.
Rowan Emergency Services Director Frank Thomason and Rowan Rescue Squad Chief Coyt Karriker addressed the various rescue teams before boats departed from Tamarac Marina for the crash site.
The Rowan Sheriffs Office cordoned off a parking lot section with police tape so the marina could keep operating Saturday. The crush of media and curious people coming by hampered the marinas business Friday afternoon.
Boats belonging to the Rowan Sheriffs Office and Alcoa Power Generating Inc. took the first group of divers to the buoys marking the underwater wreckage.
John Weddington of the Rowan Rescue Squad and Mike McNeil of the Davie Rescue Squad supervised the recovery operations. McNeil, a scuba instructor, served as a safety officer and line tender for Ressa and Moroch the first dive team in Saturday.
They both did excellent, said McNeil, a former Salisbury fireman. It was good to have someone I knew in the water.
The divers did everything by feel because of the zero visibility. McNeil said part of their scuba training is done with black masks to simulate those kinds of conditions.
Ressa said it was the second time in his diving career that he worked on a plane accident.
The divers activity released to the surface some aviation fuel or oil from the wrecked plane.
Aviation officials will try to determine the cause of the crash by putting back together pieces of the plane that have been or will be recovered.
Contact Mark Wineka at 704-797-4263.
Limbo... that's where I've been residing since the site changes!
NASCAR obviously has little sense of history.
As soon as they discover that Denny Hamlin is from the "Capital of the Confederacy" I'm sure his Phoenix win will be overturned.
No way could you deny a Phoenix appearance by the General Lee then have a Richmond driver take the checkers.
Jeff,
I apologize for not understanding how to easily get to the discussion content I have enjoyed in the past. I don't care for the change, but I appreciate the navigation lesson. In the past I have always been able to click on "Main" to instantly have all the discussions update and return. Do I have to go through the process every time of again clicking on Forum, then Discussion after that to return to an updated Discussion page, or is there a simple way not to have to jump through all those hoops?
I remain confused.
I am not a good tech student.
To me this change is awkward (I know you say it is the way the site was before I was introduced), but if it is what folks want, then so be it. Seems to me it will cut down on discussions by complicating the process, but then again, that's probably because I don't understand an easy way to do what I had gotten used to doing.
Thanks.
I am too old, too set in my ways and I guess was enjoying this site way too much.
I shall not be candid.
I like absolutely nothing about the change.
The posted discussions were what attracted me and kept me here.
Anyone who knows me knows how much I like the historical aspect of stock car racing. But, I have thoroughly enjoyed the modern topics and using them as a forum to compare.
Perhaps I have way over posted. Whatever, I don't like the change at all and will be hoping that somewhere else out there on the internet there may be an undiscovered site that will allow me to do what I enjoyed doing here.
I've met many terrific folks on this site and have enjoyed the diverse opinions, but if I want to have to hunt and peck and search through categories again, then RR will be just like all those other sites I abandoned because you couldn't see the discussions. Seeing the interesting discussions was what attracted me here and kept me here when Jim Wilmore and Bobby Williamson invited me on the site Local Race Chat to check this place out. Now, suddenly we have changed this site to resemble all those other failing sites.
My opinion. Personally, I think you've ruined the place.
Curiosity question ...
Is there a really good book out there chronicling ghost oval tracks / stock car tracks around the country?
I don't mean a book that only covers the Carolinas, but a more comprehensive piece.
I see a review of a book from a few years back that addresses ghost road racing tracks:
http://www.deepthrottle.com/History/ghost_tracks_book_review.shtml
Clicking on the above link will start the video.
Ya think these guys heard that the President of Toyota was turning hot laps at Daytona?
World War II history thunders to life at Daytona airport
By Eileen Zaffiro-Kean, Daytona Beach News-Journal
March 3, 2012
DAYTONA BEACH -- On the southern edge of Daytona Beach International Airport, hundreds of people are journeying back to the 1940s this weekend.
Parked just outside an aviation business's hangar, a row of olive green World War II military vehicles with mounted guns and two P-51 Mustang fighter planes adorned with six 50-caliber machine guns stand ready for inspection.
But stealing the show is the long, silver B-29 Superfortress flown in the later years of World War II. The four-engine, propeller-driven heavy bomber is the last of its kind in the world still flying. B-29s were the planes that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
"To see this, it's history, and there's not too much of it left," said Jim Nowak, an Air Force veteran of Vietnam wintering in New Smyrna Beach.
Nowak was one of about 100 people who gathered at Yelvington Jet Aviation Friday morning to watch the B-29 thunder into the sky for one of many flights it's making over the Daytona Beach area this weekend.
The nonprofit Commemorative Air Force, sort of a traveling museum with 150 World War II aircraft, brought the B-29 and one of the P-51s for a four-day visit that began Thursday afternoon.
The Commemorative Air Force has been moving the planes from city to city throughout the United States for five decades, and will next head to Titusville for the TICO Warbird AirShow that begins Wednesday.
It's the best way to teach people about World War II, and the legions of soldiers who fought in the battles that claimed thousands of lives, said Chris Trobridge, a public information officer with the Commemorative Air Force.
"Our mission is to preserve the legacy of the men and women who flew in World War II," said Trobridge, a history professor at Texas Tech University.
"A lot of the younger generations don't understand what World War II was even about, and the sacrifice soldiers made," said Trobridge, whose grandfather was a B-24 flight engineer. "This gives them a little taste. There's something very powerful about hearing and seeing these planes fly."
Conrad Yelvington -- the owner of the hangar, nine military vehicles and one of the P-51s on display -- agreed the history needs to be kept alive.
"How many people are old enough to remember all this?" asked the 85-year-old Yelvington, a lifelong Daytona Beach resident who got his pilot's license when he was 17 and still flies. "Most people only know what they read."
A constant stream of people poured in Friday to stare at the rare aircraft, climb into the cockpit for an up-close look and take a 30-minute flight over the area.
Unpaid volunteers fly and maintain the planes. Some are airline pilots, some are veterans and one flew Air Force One for Presidents Johnson and Nixon.
Just the sight of the B-29 and the deep roar of its engines were enough to bring Palm Coast resident Carol Lemke to tears. Her father was a gunner on B-29s, and she often went with him to reunions of his fellow Army Air Corps soldiers. He died six years ago.
"He would have loved this," Lemke said, staring at the plane as it prepared to lumber into the sky. "He would have paid whatever to be in the front. We're here for him."
Boeing made just under 4,000 of the B-29s from 1943 to 1946. The planes cost $640,000 in the 1940s, $9 million in today's dollars.
Only two-dozen of the B-29s are left, all in museums except for "Fifi," the nickname of the bomber in Daytona Beach this weekend.
Just as the aircraft are disappearing, so are World War II vets. But some of them wandered the airfield Friday, including 87-year-old Chuck Downey.
Downey, an Illinois resident who lives in DeLand seven months of the year, said he was a naval aviator who went to war in a dive bomber and flew off carriers. He enlisted when he was 18, and was a Navy commander by the time he was 33.
Proudly wearing his gold Distinguished Flying Cross on his shirt, Downey stood at the gate collecting the $5 entrance fee from visitors. In return for their money, most of them also got some of Downey's World War II stories.
Yelvington, who lives in the Spruce Creek Fly-In and owns six planes, is also a World War II veteran. He served in the Navy and was stationed in Jacksonville but wound up not going into combat.
Yelvington recalled meeting the pilot of the B-29 Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945. During that conversation 15 years ago at an aviation event in Kissimmee, he asked the pilot, Col. Paul Tibbets, if he had any remorse about killing so many people in Japan.
"He said, 'No, I ended the war,' " Yelvingtonrecalled.
As many planes as he saw during the war and since, Yelvington was still wowed Friday watching the B-29 prepare to take off.
"It's amazing the U.S. built something that ended the war," he said. "Tens of thousands of men were killed and this airplane stopped that."
Copyright 2012 The Daytona Beach News-Journal
