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SARAH HONOSKY
The (Lynchburg) News & Advance
HUDDLESTON â It was 71 years to the day her father died in a plane crash on a farm in Bedford County, and, on Tuesday, Kathleen Iacopetti stood by his memorial, wreath in hand, at the end of a cross-country journey that brought her to the site of her fatherâs death for the first time.
On June 22, 1950, a production model AJ-1 bomber, the Navyâs first strike plane designed to carry the nuclear bomb, crashed en route to a naval air station along the Patuxent River in Maryland.
The plane exploded in the air and fell in flames, killing its three crew members. Among them was 26-year-old James A. Moore Jr., a flight test engineer from California and a last-minute replacement on the final flight.
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Larry Lynch was 13 years old when he watched the sky turn red over his familyâs Bedford County farm. It was June 22, 1950, and it had rained that day. By late evening, it was hot and muggy, and he was sitting out in his yard after chores with his father and a neighbor, trying to escape the summer heat.
They heard the plane before they saw it, which wasnât unusual, but Lynch remembered the sound â high-pitched and fluctuating, an abnormal whine of the engines, the only warning that preceded its power-dive plummet to the ground below. Then, they heard the explosion.