Pair of 'geeks' sifts through history for aviation ruins

[DainBramaged]

Peter Merlin trudges through the desert, side-stepping sage brush and creosote until he reaches a spot barren of vegetation. He points out a faint crescent-shaped scar in the earth 100 feet long.
Merlin kneels and scoops up a handful of sand and lets it sift through his fingers, leaving behind three gray pebbles, each no bigger than a quarter.
"See these rocks?" he asks. "They're actually fragments of melted aluminum. This is the impact point where the flying wing crashed, and the crew lost their lives. Right here. This is the incident that gave Edwards Air Force Base its name."
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The pebbles were remnants of the YB-49, an experimental bomber that crashed in 1948 carrying Capt. Glen Edwards and a crew of four. His untimely death prompted the military to rename Muroc Air Force Base in his honor.
Finding and sorting through military crash sites in the Mojave is Merlin's hobby and pastime. He and Tony Moore, his partner on these weekend expeditions, call it "aerospace archaeology."
"Living this close to Edwards is like an Egyptologist living in Egypt," Merlin said. "It has been called the 'valley of the kings.'"

http://www.latimes.com/news/columnone/la-fi-mojave-crash-hunter-20130531-dto,0,737119.htmlstory

[JohnnyRingo]

1. Fascinating.

I love this history stuff, expecially aviation.
I knew the Northrop Flying Wing crashed there, but I didn't know that's where the name comes from.

Thanx for posting.

[Javaman]

2. Link no longer works,

looks like they pulled the story.

[DainBramaged]

3. The did, this was the end of the article I sent to a friend

Merlin and Moore take pride helping families who have lost a son or a father in one of these fatal crashes.

While standing at the YB-49 crash site that killed Edwards, Moore saw something glimmering in the dirt. He picked it up: It was a star sapphire, perfect except for a slight chip on one side.

The small stone was a mystery until Moore was talking to an engineer who had been on the base the day the YB-49 crashed.

The engineer mentioned that a member of the crew, Maj. Daniel H. Forbes, had been married just a few weeks before the accident. His wife had given him a sapphire ring.

The military had found the setting but not the stone.

Moore was stunned: "We found the stone," he said. "We found it five years ago right in the middle of the site.'"

He mailed a photograph of the sapphire to Air Force personnel, who went to visit Forbes' widow.

A half-century had passed since the tragedy. The widow had remarried and at first didn't seem to remember the ring. Then they showed her the pictures.
Without saying a word, she walked to her bedroom and returned with a matching star-sapphire ring in her hand. The stone was eventually returned to her in a ceremony at the Kansas air base that bears Daniel Forbes' name.

"It's unbelievable how many things needed to happen in order for that ring to be reunited with her," Moore said. "It validated all our work