1945 Lake Martin plane crash

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The 1945 Lake Martin plane crash was an aviation incident which occurred on March 20, 1945 in Lake Martin near Sandy Creek.

Captain John Glenn Mabry of the Army Air Forces was piloting a B-25 bomber from Bolling Field in Washington D.C. to Texas with two passengers: Captain Charles P. Oliver and Staff Sergeant James N. Green. Mabry was en route to a refueling stop at Maxwell Airfield in Montgomery when he encountered thunderstorms over east Alabama. The plane went down into the water and sank into the soft mud bed.

After the aircraft was missed, aerial searches along its flight path proved fruitless. Only after Forest Service workers at Smith Mountain identified debris on the lake shore was the crash site identified. After three days, only parts of the wreckage and Green's body had been recovered. Efforts to raise the aircraft were abandoned.

In the 2010s, divers Bobby Norwood and Jeff Norris retrieved a body panel from the sunken aircraft after many months of searching.

References

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