The rescue was carried out in howling winds, deep snow and with little hope that few, if any, of the people aboard the commuter plane survived the crash in the mountains east of Steamboat Springs.
But tonight, the co-pilot and many of the 19 surviving passengers aboard Rocky Mountain Airways Flight 217 will meet with rescuers at Denver’s Wings Over the Rockies museum to dedicate an exhibit memorializing the crash and their subsequent rescue.
All but two people survived the Dec. 4, 1978, crash along Little Grizzly Creek, about 20 miles east of Steamboat Springs and 6 miles east of the summit of 10,180-foot Buffalo Pass.
The rescue is, and remains, a landmark for the Civil Air Patrol, founded in 1941.
The CAP rescued and saved more people from the flight — 20 — than any other CAP rescue attempt in its history, said Capt. Scott Orr, public affairs officer for the CAP’s Black Sheep Senior Squadron in Colorado.
Killed were the pilot, Scott Alan Klopfenstein, and passenger Mary Kay Hardin.
What stood out was the courage of the passengers and rescuers, said Orr.
The passengers found themselves in the shattered cabin of the DeHavilland DHC-6 Twin Otter, their pilot and co-pilot critically injured in the cockpit.
The passengers did their best to help Klopfenstein and co-pilot Gary Coleman as well as the most seriously injured passengers. Klopfenstein died three days later.
The rescuers used their ingenuity to figure out where the plane went down. Then they battled strong winds, heavy snow and subfreezing temperatures to reach the survivors.
Orr said that the plane’s radio beacon had gone off but that the mountains played tricks with the beacon’s signal, making the precise location of the crash difficult to discern.
But using what little information they could glean from the beacon — and knowledge that electricity had been disrupted about the time the plane’s pilot said he was returning to the Steamboat because of severe icing — CAP rescuers thought they knew the general area where the plane crashed. They believed it had clipped a power line as it went down.
“Two of our guys (at CAP) headed up by Sno-Cat to where they thought the crash was,” said Orr. “It took them awhile, but they finally found it.”
They also found the survivors.
But they had to leave most of them so they could go down to the CAP base camp and lead a convoy of Sno-Cats up to the battered plane, said Orr.
In September, the CAP began collecting parts of the plane from the crash site, including pieces of the wing and tail, to be part of the Wings Over the Rockies exhibit.
The exhibit also includes passenger belongings found at the site, including a wedding dress; photographs from the plane crash and rescue; and survivors and rescuers who will tell their stories.
Orr said that among those expected tonight are Matt Kotts, who was an 8-month-old baby sitting in his mom’s lap when the plane went down, and Coleman, the co-pilot. Kotts is now a pilot himself.
Orr said that in early December, the 30th anniversary of the crash, many of the passengers and Coleman were reunited for the first time.
Orr said it was a very emotional reunion with the passengers embracing Coleman.
“They didn’t blame him,” said Orr. “It was very touching.”
Coleman told the passengers that the weather was not expected to be as bad as he and Klopfenstein encountered. When the ice began to build up, they immediately headed back to Steamboat.
“As they turned around, they sank,” was the way Coleman described it to people he hadn’t seen in 30 years.
Howard Pankratz: 303-954-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com
