Fifty years later, pilot searches for answers after 1971 Chinle crash landing
Submitted
Pat Oliphant, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and former squadron mate of Lt. Col. R.C. “Doc” Weaver, drew this illustration of a 1971 emergency landing near Chinle after the engine failed on a family flight. The caption in the cartoon reads, “All I said was, ‘That wasn’t a landing it was an arrival’.”
By Nolan Bruno
Special to the Times
WINDOW ROCK – In the summer of 1971, a routine family flight in a Mooney M-20 took a terrifying turn over Chinle. Scott Weaver was 11 years old, seated as a passenger, when the aircraft suffered a complete engine failure and his father, a decorated U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel, was forced to make an emergency landing southeast of Chinle Airport.
“I remember it was a warm morning in the middle of June,” Weaver recalls. “I remember landing on top of a berm or a mesa. When we landed, the right gear collapsed and the left went with it. We probably skidded about 300 yards.”
The mechanical failure left little margin for error. Weaver said the aircraft came down hard but avoided a fire.
“I remember the airplane came to rest with no fire or sparks. We quickly exited the airplane, and I sustained a bit of a bruise,” Weaver said.
To read the full article, please see the Feb. 12, 2026, edition of the Navajo Times.
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Highway 264,
I-40, WB @ Winslow