“What I would give for the black box, if they had had them back then,” says the son of co-pilot Bascom Lee Haley, who was just 13 months old when the plane crashed.
Haley had 2,858 hours in the air with Piedmont Airlines, 1,678 of them on DC-3 aircraft, such as flight #349, and his son says that although just 27 years old, his dad also had extensive military flight training.
“He was rated one of the best instrument flyers in his Air Force Training,” says Mike Haley, who finds himself baffled how two experienced pilots, could have run into a mountain.
As for the son, now a videographer in Winston-Salem, Mike Haley finds himself constantly wrestling with the crash, but his unease doesn’t keep him out of the skies.
“I fly fear-free,” says Haley. “Why would God take both me and my dad?”