Pat Macha kneels in a hilly expanse of south Orange County chaparral in the cool canyon morning, brushing dirt from a scattering of metal debris.
He uses a garden spade and his hands to unearth the remains of a fighter plane. An American flag sticks up from the ground nearby, planted by the former high-school history teacher.
Macha is searching for a postcard-size scrap that will give a name to the pilot who died here and identify the aircraft that crashed decades ago.
Some of his tools may be modern–satellite navigation to locate the wrecks, a metal detector to map the buried debris–but his heart is with the machines and pilots of bygone days.
Macha, 60, describes himself as an airplane archaeologist. He honors aviators of the past by searching out and chronicling their wrecks all over the country, including a five-year search for Gertrude Tompkins Silver, the only missing female World War II Army pilot.
“Mostly they’re in remote locations,” Macha said of the crash sites. “When you find them, you really do go back to the past, and you’re touching the past. It’s uncanny. And in the search there’s great satisfaction. That’s where time has stopped.”
Since stumbling onto his first crash site 40 years ago as a camp counselor, the Huntington Beach resident has visited about 800 wrecks.
“I found that first wreck in the early 1960s, and I just wanted to know why it happened, who was involved,” he said.
The third edition of his guide to 1,300 California crash sites is “Aircraft Wrecks in the Mountains and Deserts of California, 1909-2002.”
“I like to tell the stories about these wrecks, the human aspects,” he said. “That’s where most people are hooked in.”
Macha reveres the pilots of WW II, when lessons were learned in the air instead of in simulators and nearly 35,000 died in noncombat flights.
The wreck of the Corsair F-G1 fighter plane that Macha cataloged that cool May morning in the canyon belonged to such a person: Capt. Calvin K. Vermillion, a U.S. Marine stationed at now-shuttered El Toro air base, in Southern California, in 1944.
According to military records obtained by Macha, a midair blackout during a training exercise sent Vermillion into the Plano Trabuco, killing him.
Macha used his metal detector to chart the 10 percent of Vermillion’s plane that was not cleared away by an El Toro recovery crew in 1944.
But for his next quest, recovering Silver’s wreck from the Santa Monica Bay, he’ll need much more than that.
Silver, one of about 1,000 women in the Army’s Women Airforce Service Pilots, disappeared almost immediately after takeoff from Los Angeles on an overcast October day in 1944. Macha, Silver’s family and a team of volunteers began looking for her in 1996.
“I’m fascinated by any aviation story,” said Ken Whittall-Scherfee, who is married to Silver’s grandniece. “It’s really just a matter of doing everything we can do to try to locate her.”
“For me, it’s the least I can do,” Macha said.
