Mann Gulch plane goes on display

MISSOULA – A museum here is now exhibiting the airplane that flew 15 smokejumpers to a 1949 wildfire where 12 of them and a forest ranger died, a catastrophe that changed firefighting and was told in the 1992 best-seller “Young Men and Fire” by Norman Maclean.

The restored DC-3 on permanent display at the Museum of Mountain Flying was dedicated Sunday. Among those on hand was 95-year-old Earl Cooley, who served as the jumpmaster and spotter aboard the flight to Mann Gulch, along the Missouri River north of Helena.

Eleven men died in the gulch Aug. 5, 1949, and two others with severe burns died the next day. The deadly blaze led the U.S. Forest Service to institute a number of changes in firefighting practices.

Other than the absence of benches, Cooley said, the plane is the same as when it transported the jumpers 57 years ago.

“It’s good to remember these things so our younger people know what we did,” said Cooley, who climbed into the belly of the plane Sunday and looked at the cargo area.

The plane, put to fire use after Johnson Flying Service Inc. of Missoula bought it at a 1946 surplus sale, remained in service until sold by Johnson in the mid-1970s.

A few years ago, one of the plane’s former pilots saw it in Arkansas, and a plan to return the aircraft to Montana took shape. In 2001 the plane was bought with $125,000 in donations and flown to Missoula.

Shined to a high luster, the plane looks better than ever, said Wally Small, a former smokejumper who jumped from it in 1952-53. “I’m glad it’s here,” Small said. “It’s a real piece of history, a real piece of important history.”

Doris Johnson was 10 when she saw the plane as her smokejumper brother, Eldon Diettert, prepared to leave for Mann Gulch. The departure was on her brother’s birthday and the family had taken a cake to him at the smokejumper center.

“I find it a little sad, but I appreciate it as a memorial,” Johnson said Sunday. “I just wish my parents could have been here for it.”