It was 80 years ago on this week (1945): the death of noted Wichita pilot, Capt. Fred McConnell, at age 26.
McConnell died when his low-flying plane struck a high-tension power line with telephone wires a half-mile west of Garden Plain, crashing in a field.
Fred was the second of the three flying McConnell brothers to die young, after having survived 61 missions as a B-24 pilot in the South Pacific during World War II.
Fred and his two brothers, Thomas and Edwin, were all from Wichita; they joined the United States Army Air Corps as aviation cadets on the same day -- March 22, 1942. The brothers all flew as co-pilots for the B-24 Liberator in the Pacific Theater.
Thomas McConnell had died in a plane crash during the war in 1943, at age 20.
In 1944, Fred received a promotion to captain and served three additional assignments, including one at the Midwestern Procurement District, Army Airfield Material Center, which occupied the entire second floor of the Wichita Municipal Airport; he also worked with Boeing Aircraft Company on a series of warplanes during wartime.
Fred had remained in the Army Air Forces after the war, and in October 1945 he was transferred to the Army Air Field in Garden City, at the air base there. Fred and his wife, Mary Louise, known as Blondie, departed Wichita en route to Garden City in Fred’s own private plane, a 1931 blue-and-yellow open-cockpit Fleet Model 8 biplane. In the front cockpit with Blondie were linens for their new house in Garden City.
25 miles west of Wichita, the Fleet hit a power line and crashed. Blondie survived; Fred, however, who, according to the Civil Aeronautics Administration accident report, was not wearing his seat belt, was killed instantly.
Wichita's McConnell Air Force Base is named after the flying McConnell brothers.