Landing Gear

At a time when divorce seems as common as marriages, Lorraine and Gerald “Manny” Ebersole are living proof that couples can stay together. About 50 of the Washington County couple’s family members gathered at Nick’s Airport Inn near Hagerstown Thursday afternoon to celebrate a major anniversary milestone. Fifty years of marriage, you might have guessed? Higher. Sixty years? More. It has been 70 years since the two teenagers tied the knot on a Christmas night in a church at Antietam and Mulberry Streets in Hagerstown.

A Cessna 402 airplane had a potential problem with its left-side landing gear while it was in the air Wednesday morning before landing safely at Hagerstown Regional Airport, a 911 dispatcher said. It appeared the plane was getting ready to land when authorities were alerted by the airport's flight control tower at 10:18 a.m., the dispatcher said. The plane was able to land without incident and the passengers onboard were OK, the dispatcher said.

julieg@herald-mail.com Five people escaped uninjured Saturday after a pilot landed a twin-engine Cessna at Hagerstown Regional Airport with one of the main landing gear up, Airport Fire Chief Phil Ridenour said. "He did a real good job," Ridenour said of the pilot, whose name he did not have. The plane was owned by a Baltimore man, he said. The plane was heading from Baltimore to Allentown, Pa., when the pilot realized all of the main landing gear was not down, Ridenour said.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- For more than a decade, Northwest Airlines repeatedly failed to follow federal safety orders but wasn't held accountable by the Federal Aviation Administration, according to a government report. The report by the Transportation Department's inspector general's office confirmed many of the allegations brought by a whistleblower in 2005 and again in 2008 of a cozy relationship between FAA managers and the airlines they are charged with inspecting. FAA inspector Mark Lund charged that FAA managers at the safety office that oversaw Northwest routinely allowed the airline to avoid penalties or fines by voluntarily disclosing failures.

By BRYN MICKLE / Staff Writer, Martinsburg photo: JOE CROCETTA / staff photographer MARTINSBURG, W.Va. - A Virginia man walked away unscathed Monday afternoon after the experimental plane he was flying crashed behind an airplane hangar at Eastern West Virginia Regional Airport. [cont. from news page ] John Morgan Prendergast, 59, of Sterling, Va., was flying a single-engine plane with a top-mounted propeller about 3:30 p.m. Monday when the engine cut out near the Sino Swearingen production facility at the airport, police said.

HAGERSTOWN -- The Hagerstown Aviation Museum has launched an emergency fundraising campaign to cover unexpected repairs to a historic, Hagerstown-made airplane it hopes to fly into town next month, according to museum president Kurtis Meyers. An inspection revealed the 1953 Fairchild C-119 Flying Boxcar donated to the museum in 2006 needs about $35,000 worth of additional repairs before it can be flown from Wyoming to its new home at the museum, and time is running out, Meyers said.

andrews@herald-mail.com WAYNESBORO, PA. - Joseph Kadel isn't flying airplanes anymore, but he's keeping his certification valid because, well, you never know. Kadel, 92, considers aviation a sport, of sorts, which is why he was lured into it as a young man. "Anybody that was deeply involved in sports, they're deeply accustomed to being challenged," Kadel said. He remembers himself as an athlete, with that mind-set, when he was 25 years old. "(Flying) was a natural thing for a young man of that age to do," he said.

HAGERSTOWN - Fred Mack learned how to rivet and weld when he worked at Fairchild Aircraft Co. in Hagerstown in the 1930s. "I learned how to stretch metal and make it fit the frame," Mack, 96, said Saturday at the ninth Hagerstown Fly-In and Fairchild Aircraft Family Reunion. The free admission event continues today from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Hagerstown Aircraft Services facility at Hagerstown Regional Airport. The son of a Hagerstown architect, Mack said he landed a job at Fairchild in 1934 while studying aeronautics at New York University.

Ward Wilkins flew a silver-and-black Fairchild PT-19 to Hagerstown last Saturday. His journey started in Indiana the day before, but the journey for the airplane started 64 years ago in Hagerstown. The 1943 airplane returned to the place where it was built, and Wilkins donated it to the Hagerstown Aviation Museum. The airplane is one of an ever-decreasing number of flying PT-19s still in existence. The PT-19 was manufactured in Hagerstown by the Fairchild Co. starting in 1939.

Corliss went from the front lines to the silver screen By DAVE McMILLION / Staff Writer, Charles Town photo: RIC DUGAN / staff photographer SHENANDOAH JUNCTION, W.Va. - In addition to a long stint in the military, his work as a beef farmer and even a stab at politics, Greg Corliss can boast of his time on the silver screen. The Jefferson County, W.Va., man was one of the many military pilots selected in 1968 to fly planes for the making of the movie "Tora, Tora, Tora," which was about the events leading up to the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the attack.