By all accounts, Wayne Wirt didn’t have to die.
The 66-year-old retired Hollywood prop and set builder, father of two and licensed pilot had for years been itching to fly his 1966 Piper Cherokee from his home in California to his new property in Chehalis.
There were signs that the journey he’d planned was overly risky. His wife and younger son had tried to warn him. Wirt didn’t listen, and he died on Sept. 22, 2022, his body torn apart when his plane smashed, nose-first, into a cinder cone in the Mount Jefferson Wilderness in central Oregon at 2:39 p.m.
Wirt likely got disoriented in the clouds, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded, according to the agency’s report on the crash, released in May.
While it’s unknown exactly why Wirt crashed or why he decided to fly towards bad weather when he had safer options, the traits that made Wirt the man he was — doggedness, independence and a confidence that he could overcome any challenge — may have been precisely the traits that sealed his fate.
Two years after the crash, Wirt’s wife, his youngest son and his pilot friends still cannot figure out his decisions that day.
“Why would you fly over a black cloud, a thunderstorm, a rainstorm, when you have another path to go that would get you to the same place that has clear skies?” Wirt’s youngest son, Corey Winters, said. “That’s the question that I’ll never have answered.”
Wirt would’ve seen clear skies in every direction that day except the one he flew in, satellite images taken at the time show.
Wirt’s death prompted an odd bureaucratic diktat: the U.S. Forest Service said his family would have to pay the cost to remove his remains and the plane wreckage from the wilderness area. One contractor’s estimated cost to do the job: $50,000.
Another, less-surprising effect of the family patriarch’s death followed: His devoted wife, who was looking forward to a quiet retirement in the company of her best friend, suffered in unexpected late-life solitude on the couple’s new property in rural Chehalis.
“I feel like I lost my compass,” Cindy Wirt said.
‘CAN-DO’
Cindy and Wayne, after dating for five years, married in 1984 on St. Patrick’s Day, “so that he could remember our anniversary,” Cindy Wirt said recently, with a laugh. They were too busy working and had little money, so they had no honeymoon, she said. She worked as an accountant for a car dealership and Wayne Wirt was a carpenter on Hollywood sets.
Wayne Wirt wanted to buy a piece of land in the California desert and live “off the grid,” and the couple did exactly that, having two children in the process. It was difficult, but they managed.
“He showed me that whatever he put his mind to, he could figure it out,” Cindy Wirt said. “It didn’t seem like there was anything he couldn’t really do.”
Along with his “can-do” approach to life came an attitude of “good enough,” Corey Winters said, an outcome of his father’s Hollywood career. Wayne Wirt would regularly see his work on sets torn down after it was no longer needed, and so he developed a mindset that what he needed had to be only good enough to pass muster in the moment, Winters said.
In the mid-1980s, Wayne Wirt got interested in flying, and he used a tractor to clear a stretch of land to make a dirt landing strip on his California property. He built hangars that he rented out to people with airplanes. Then he got his own pilot’s license and bought a four-seat, single-engine airplane.
In 2012, Wayne Wirt retired and went on disability because of severe knee problems. Three years later, he and Cindy bought a piece of land in Chehalis. They wanted to move to Washington to be closer to Cindy Wirt’s mother, in Port Angeles, and Winters, who lived in Portland at the time.
Just like they had done about 30 years earlier, the land they bought was a fresh slate and, after signing the paperwork in 2015, they got to work building a house. A key feature, though, was already in place: The plot of land was adjacent to a private landing strip. Over the years that followed, the couple would take multiple trips back and forth from their Llano, California, home to Chehalis, carting their belongings and building out the new property.
THE PLAN
Almost immediately, Wayne Wirt started thinking about flying his Piper Cherokee to Washington. The journey would be by far the longest flight he had ever taken in the small plane — a major trip compared to the short, sunny-day jaunts he would take with his flying buddies in California.
Although Wirt had logged more than 950 hours of flight time, he had little experience flying in bad weather, because conditions in southern California are usually clear. And he had no experience flying in bad weather in the mountains, where treacherous conditions can easily arise in the interaction between winds and the terrain. And, in the five years before his fatal flight, Wirt barely had time to fly his plane at all, too busy moving and working on the new house.
And yet, he persisted in his goal to fly from California to Washington.
Knowing she couldn’t dissuade him from his plan altogether, Cindy Wirt urged him to at least take somebody with him to have an extra pair of eyes on the controls and on the ground, or to take over for him if he got tired.
“I don’t feel comfortable with you flying that far alone,” she recalled telling him about a month before his final flight.
“Oh, well,” he replied, confident as ever.
“What if you get tired?” she asked.
“Then I’ll land and I’ll stay there,” he replied.
In mid-September 2022, he drove south to the Llano property with his older son, who then drove back to Chehalis with a trailer. Wayne Wirt was making plans to fly to Oregon the second weekend in September when a friend, Bill McClellan, urged him to reconsider because of the weather forecast for Oregon.
McClellan, a more experienced pilot than Wayne Wirt, had become a sort of intermittent, informal flight consultant for Wirt. He was concerned about Wirt’s plan to fly such a long distance solo with no experience doing so — and little recent flying at all. But he felt he wasn’t in a position to tell Wirt what to do, he said recently. He did try to steer him in the right direction, though, and the weather forecast leading up to that weekend showed storms ahead.
Wayne Wirt agreed to wait until the weather improved, and he checked the weather every day until eventually settling on the following Thursday as his departure day. McClellan told him that if he was set on going despite poor weather in Oregon, he should fly east of the Cascade Mountains, where he could expect clear skies. But eventually he would still have to turn west to get to Chehalis.
McClellan hoped Wayne Wirt would wait even longer for the weather to improve, he said, but Wirt seemed to be in a hurry.
Winters, the Wirts’ youngest son, was on the Columbia River on his sailboat, between Astoria and Scappoose, when he got a message from his mom telling him that his father was finally planning to fly to Washington. Winters called his father, who told his son he was planning to fly within days.
Like his mother, Winters was worried about Wayne Wirt flying by himself. It was a very long flight, and the plane didn’t have an autopilot system, which meant that Wayne Wirt would have to be actively flying the plane the entire time, an exhausting and mentally straining task for anyone, let alone a man in his mid-60s. Winters urged his father not to fly alone.
“He basically blew me off and was, like, ‘I’m fine,’” Winters recalled.
THE FLIGHT
Bill McClellan checked the weather forecast again before his friend’s flight on Sept. 22, 2022, planned for 7 a.m. that morning. The forecast called for clouds over the Cascade Mountains that afternoon, and McClellan sent Wayne Wirt a text message to make sure he knew.
“Looks like Oregon will have lots of clouds breaking in afternoon,” McClellan wrote at 6:40 a.m., receiving no reply.
Wayne Wirt departed around the scheduled time and called his wife at his first stop, at an airport east of San Francisco.
“How are things going?” she asked him.
“Very well,” he told her.
“Be safe,” Cindy Wirt said, and they hung up.
Wayne Wirt then flew to Sisters, where he took on more gas at 2:10 p.m. and lifted off again. According to weather readings at the time, the skies directly north of Sisters were clear, while clouds were gathering over the Cascades.
Almost exactly 29 minutes later, Wayne Wirt’s plane slammed into South Cinder Peak, about 500 feet below the summit, obliterating the airplane. Wirt died of “massive blunt and sharp force trauma,” according to a Linn County Medical Examiner’s report cited by federal officials. Besides likely becoming disoriented by the cloud cover, he was almost certainly tired after seven hours flying, investigators wrote.
Cindy Wirt had been following her husband’s progress using the Find My iPhone application and, that afternoon, was surprised to see that the blue dot identifying his phone’s location on the map had stopped moving. At first she assumed it was a tech glitch, but an hour after his scheduled 4 p.m. arrival time in Chehalis came and went, she began to seriously worry.
A neighbor who was a commercial pilot called Seattle-Tacoma airport’s air-traffic control for Cindy Wirt and asked if there had been reports of a plane down, and they said yes. The next day, the Coast Guard informed Winters they had found the wreckage of a plane, but it wasn’t until three days after the crash, a Sunday, that she got confirmation that the plane was her husband’s. The weeks that followed were a daze for her as the grief and shock overwhelmed her.
THE AFTERMATH
Wayne Wirt’s death triggered an unexpected consequence — the airplane was uninsured, which meant the family had to get the wreckage off of the slope themselves or pay the U.S. Forest Service to do it. A contractor told them it would cost about $50,000, Cindy Wirt said.
Winters’ wife set up a GoFundMe page.
And then a YouTube star got involved.
A viewer of the HeavyDSparks YouTube channel reached out to David Sparks and told him about the problem Cindy Wirt faced. It was a perfect challenge for Sparks, who documents on the channel how he and his friends pull off difficult recovery operations.
Sparks got permission from the U.S. Forest Service to haul the wreckage and Wayne Wirt’s remains and film the operation. It took two hours and multiple helicopter flights to put Wirt’s remains into body bags and to get him and the plane off of the mountain on Oct. 20, about a month after the crash.
Sparks’ team put the airplane wreckage onto a trailer, and he drove it to Chehalis, arriving at Cindy Wirt’s house around nightfall.
The work went unexpectedly smoothly, Sparks told Cindy Wirt in a video about the recovery operation that has been viewed nearly 3.9 million times.
“He was definitely tired of being up there,” Sparks said, adding that Wayne Wirt “had a million-dollar view, for sure.”
The YouTuber saved the family $50,000 and a host of bureaucratic hassles, but the grief and the nagging, unanswerable questions remain.
Winters, who is himself a licensed pilot and aircraft mechanic, said he’s trying to use what happened to his father to help educate others about the dangers of mountain flying. Cindy Wirt, meanwhile, has become worried that she is isolating herself in her grief. She is looking for a regular counselor.
Two years after the crash, the plane’s wreckage remains in Cindy Wirt’s hangar.
“She’s not ready to let it go,” Winters said. “So it just sits.”
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