Ron Slattery
Class Of 1959

When Roger Nicholson called the other day to tell me about the upcoming 50th reunion and see if the contact info he had was accurate (and if I was still upright and breathing), we talked about people on the missing list and those who had gone on before us. It brought back memories I hadn't dredged up for decades.

Others may have kept in touch with Ron when I moved away and lost contact, but since Ron was one of my best friends at Westside, I thought that others might be interested in an "In Memory" giving the 'rest of the story' I pieced together after Ron died in a small plane crash.

Ron Slattery and I were close friends through high school, scuba diving, joining each other's families on vacation, and crusing in his MGA.  After we graduated though, I headed to Doane and he went to Nebraska Wesleyan.  And while we did get together for concerts in Lincoln or occasional weekends when both of us were home, we were beginning to go our own way.  

I enlisted in the Air Force, and we lost touch.  I did stop by his parent's house once when I was in town, and learned that Ron had married and had begun taking flying lessons.  When my folks sent me the newspaper clipping saying he’d been killed in a small plane crash, it hit me like a ton of bricks.  Something like that happened to someone you vaguely knew, or it was just another small story in the back pages of the paper.  The newspaper clipping was little more than a paragraph listing name, date, and the fact a small plane had crashed with a single fatality.  On my next trip home, I tried to find out more about what had happened, but back then without the information resources available these days, I was limited to what I could learn from his parents.  To this day though, at least in my mind, there’s still a cloud hanging over his death.  And almost 50 years later, I still have strong doubts and suspicions about what happened that day.

From what I was able to piece together - from obviously one-sided resources, the day he died he’d been impatiently waiting for his next lesson since he was scheduled to solo for the first time, and was really looking forward to that final step and getting his pilot’s license.  He took a blank check out of the checkbook to pay for the lesson, stuck it in his wallet, danced out of the house, and zoomed off down the road.  He never made it home.

After the crash, the company providing the flying lessons claimed that Ron was not scheduled for a lesson that day, not yet ready to solo, and had stolen a plane and crashed it.  There was an investigation into the crash, but no mechanical problems were reported.  The flying school refused to allow Ron’s parents access to the plane to conduct a more detailed and independent examination.  The jacket he was wearing when he left the house and the check he took with him were not found when they recovered his body, or in his car parked in the flying school parking lot.  And the check was never cashed.

My conclusion at the time was that there had been some problem with the plane, and the flying school reacted to the possibility of legal or financial responsibility by launching a rather clumsy but effective preemptive/defensive strike.  The term “cover-up” wouldn’t become a household word until years later, but the concept and practice were certainly nothing new.  And in this case the effect on family was unforgivable.

I knew Ron.  We may have done some silly/stupid things back then, but he was too sharp to have parked his car in the flying school parking lot and then stolen a plane - from a place where he was well known, and in broad daylight - under circumstances where he’d almost certainly be discovered long before he could do his pre-flight prep on the plane and take off.

In putting this together and dredging up memories I had buried long ago, I came to the same conclusions - still based on limited information gathered from obviously biased sources.  Fifty years later, we would have had internet access to everything from FAA reports to aircraft manufacturer’s maintenance and safety bulletins.  And we might have been able to take advantage of that information to force a detailed forensic examination of the aircraft.  We’d know if they repaired and rebuilt the plane, changed the tail number, or scrapped it.  And we’d know what was done if they rebuilt it.  But even then, we wouldn’t know for sure how much of the rebuilding was done to repair damage from the crash and what may have been done to hide or correct any preexisting conditions.

I believe that Ron was indeed scheduled to solo, and that the plane had some problem resulting in something an inexperienced pilot was not able to handle.  And even with Ron’s relative inexperience, John Denver comes to mind; an experienced pilot can quickly find himself in unforgiving circumstances.  The crash may have been due to pilot error, may have been caused by some mechanical failure, a combination of those two, or other unknown factors.  Or... it may have been something potentially damaging to the flying school, such as a gas gauge that showed a full tank when it was really close to empty - or perhaps a lack of adequate or scheduled maintenance.

The check which was no longer in his wallet and never found, and his missing jacket, both of which might have been left in the flying school office, didn’t fit the official story and mysteriously disappeared.  But in the end, it doesn’t really change what happened - beyond the damage done to a young man’s reputation and how the accusations devastated his family.

John Ralph