| Summary: | Crosson's Air Exploits Many: Many Daring Adventures Are Fast Becoming Legends In Alaska. CROSSON'S AIR EXPLOITS MANY Many Daring Adventures Are Fast Becoming Legends in Alaska. Out of Alaska's barren wastes have come a thousand and on stories about Pilot Joe Crosson, who flew the funeral plane bearing the bodies of Will Rogers and Wiley Post back to civilization after their tragic crash, writes Charles Norman of the Associated Press. Shy, small—he stands about five feet six inches—with a slight wave to it, he flashes a smile full of teeth and waves a deprecating hand when storeis about his feats in the north come to his ears: "Any pilot can do it," he says at, I such times. But somehow it manages to be Joe Crosson who comes through. It was he who found and brought back the body of Carl Ben Eilsen when that pioneer of the Alaskan airways crashed and was listed among the missing. It was he who brought a stricken appendicitis patient in from the wilderness to Fairbanks. "Happened Along." And it was Joe who "happened along" when a plane with three passengers cracked up in a stream. He brought his ship down, dived in and saved them all. Joe is 32 years old. He has flown by day and by night over the difficult terrain where Rogers and Post crashed, ana Knows intimately, his associates say, the peculiarities of the weather up there. Here is a typical Crosson story which Wiley Post told just after his solo hop around the world in 1933. Flying from Khabarovsk, Siberia, in a 2800-mile hop, Post came down with a bang at Flat, Alaska. He nosed over on the wet, boggy ground—Flat is an emergency landing field, with no staff—and broke one side of his landing gear. The propeller was bent beyond saving. Post took a sad look his Winnie Mae, and felt it was the i of his world race. Dead tired, crawled into a shack there and fell sound asleep. Radioed His Flight. He told how a man radioed Fairbanks of his flight. Joe arrived with a mechanic and a metal welder he had pressed into service. They worked furiously to bring back the Winnie Mae to flying condition, and finally started up the otor. Post woke up. "There was Crosson," he related. 'Come on,' Joe said, 'you can't stay here—you'd better be getting along now.' I almost cried when I saw the plane all warmed up and ready to go." The day before Rogers and Post crashed, near Point Barrow, Crosson flew them from Fairbanks to Anchorage and back.
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