F-86 Sabre Crash In Chatham New Brunswick 1956: I grew up in Chatham and of course as young boys we were always looking for something to do and there was always airplanes to watch especially in the summer. These were the heydays of the Sabre Squadrons. The Sabres flew out of RCAF Station Chatham and for a young fella the excitement of these planes was too much to resist. On one particular day in the summer of 1956 a few friends and I were watching a flight of Sabres taking off from the north/south runway at the "Port" We locals called the RCAF Station "The Port". The first three took off ok but the fourth plane couldn't seem to get very high in the air and we knew something was wrong when it started to clip off some tree tops down by the school in town. The pilot ejected and the plane kept flying and eventually cut off a few more trees and eventually hit a barge on the shore of the Miramichi river and exploded. We boys ran down to the crash site and watched all the action. The Firefighters from the "Port" arrived with their foam trucks and proceeded to assist the town fire department in putting out the fire. I took a keen interest in one of the big trucks from the "Port" and was asking a lot of questions of the operator. Well I guess he was busy so he told me to scat and get out of the way but he was nice about it. About 10 years later in 1967 I was now a Firefighter stationed in 3 (F) Wing Zweibrucken. One day at the Crash Annex the crew was shooting the breeze and all were talking about the crashes they worked at in their postings. Of course I didn't have any to talk about because I was a kid rookie so I mentioned about the F-86 Sabre crash I was at in Chatham ... and all the details about the crash and the Firefighter that told me to scat. There was a guy on the crew that day that completed the story for me because he was the nice Firefighter who told me to scat ... Harvey Varrin, some of you might know him. Harvey was the guy operating the big truck. A side note to this anecdote, the pilot ejected at too low an altitude and did not survive the ejection. He became somewhat of a local hero when it was realized that he stayed with the plane in order to avoid the possibity of it crashing into the hospital which was directly in the flight path. Shortly after the Air Force closed that runway to avoid further crashes over the town.

Contributed By Master Warrant Officer (Retired) Paul Landry