Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Bonanza Flight 114 Crash

Tue, Nov 15, 2011 (4:04 p.m.)

While snow in Las Vegas is not unheard of in November, on the night of Nov. 15, 1964, an unusually heavy snowstorm began socking in the valley as Bonanza Flight 114 made its way from Phoenix to McCarran Field. Flight 114, with 26 passengers and three crew aboard, was on its final approach about 15 miles southwest of McCarran when it was given the OK at 8:23 p.m. to continue on its heading and descend under 7000 feet. At 8:36 p.m., the blip representing the twin-turboprop F-27 on the McCarran control tower radar suddenly disappeared from the screen. Soon after, a Clark County Sheriff’s posse assembled on Blue Diamond Road and began a search that would continue through the night as lawmen, volunteers and newsmen combed the lower slopes of the Spring Mountain range looking for any evidence of the ill-fated flight. Shortly after 7 a.m. on Nov. 16th, Sheriff’s Deputies Karl Albright and Chuck Martin, along with Jim Deitch of the Las Vegas News Bureau, spotted the wreckage spread over a wide mesa, unremarkable save for the nearly half foot of snow that blanketed the grisly scene where 29 people perished on impact. Nearly 50 years later, evidence of the crash, as well as two memorial plaques, is still visible among the scrub and sedimentary rock of the unnamed mesa.

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