Airplane Hunter

Fighter Factory employs one person full time to do nothing but search out such crash sites for possible recovery. Dallas Tohill is retired from the Army Special Forces with extensive experience in the jungles of Latin America. He seems happiest walking through the swamps with just a compass and his backpack.

Many of the crash sites he has found can be mostly attributed to his persistence and dedication. He often goes from house to house along the woods asking about elderly people that lived in the vicinity during the war that might be able to remember a particular crash that he is trying to find. Often his best source is the driver of a pickup truck with hunting dogs in the back. These are the people that traverse remote and uninhabited sections of the forest or swamp during hunting season. Over a warm fire, they often relate among each other about the old airplane wreck that they came across last season while they were hunting deer or other elusive animals.

In the same way, discussions held with park rangers, timber agents, or even sheriff departments provide valuable intelligence information about possible wreck sites that they might have stumbled across. He posts "Missing Airplane" flyers in country stores, rural post offices, or county airports and often receives unexpected telephone calls about previously unknown crash sites. Often they are only rumors and the plane has already been hauled away, or sometimes they are more modern jets. But occasionally, it is a long forgotten World War II combat aircraft laying undisturbed deep in the woods.

Whenever possible, he tries to obtain the services of a local person to try and take him directly to the reported location. It i much more difficult to try and find it by just searching independently in the woods walking a grid pattern. The brush is normally so thick that walking past it without noticing the wreck is not uncommon. Endless hours and days can be saved by finding a more efficient method of pinpointing the exact location. Sometimes unusual growth patterns of the vegetation will lend clues as there being or having been a large foreign object in the vicinity. Small clearings, tree tops that were once clipped, oil and gas spillage retarding growth, are all discrete clues as to a former aircraft accident.

Searching by helicopter is possible, but the expense involved can rapidly multiply, so that it is no longer economically feasible. Tidewater Tech sent Dallas Tohill the past two summers to Western Alaska to search for a reported lend lease P-40 fighter en-route to Russia. He spent several weeks each year searching for this one aircraft by helicopter on a native Indian reservation outside of Nome. Even though they found several other airplanes that crashed under similar circumstances, the one they were looking for was never found on the vast open and treeless tundra.