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" FOUR IDENTICAL ROOMS, A, B, C, AND D, ONE FOR EACH CORNER OF ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY&amp;#039;S RIGHT-ANGLED ADMINISTRATION BUILDING, AND IN EACH OF THEM A FUNERAL SCHEDULED TO BEGIN at one o&amp;#039;clock on this overcast August afternoon: Bradford, Crossfield, Flattley, and Lee. And in the hour after that, there will be four more: Daily, Kirkpatrick, Ratcliff, and Strausser. And there will be four more after that, the families pooling together in the lobby, united by their brave faces, and their funeral processions passing by a rumbling yellow Caterpillar unceremoniously scooping out another grave. With so many aged veterans and young soldiers having exercised their right to be buried here, these are some of the new motions of loss. More of them remain time-honored. First, there is the gathering, the comfort found in numbers and memories. For this particular old man, there are hundreds of mourners assigned to Room B, cane-toting leatherheads and young flyboys and even Neil Armstrong, dragged out of hiding by the death of a friend. Next comes the long line of cars inching behind the old man&amp;#039;s family, who walk behind a polished black caisson drawn by four white horses. On top of the caisson is a flag-draped casket; behind an invisible door in the back of the casket is hidden a small wooden box; inside that small wooden box is an urn; the urn is filled with ashes.  The long walk stops when a whispered signal is given, and suddenly Navy jets scream overhead, four F/A-18&amp;#039;s, with the second of them peeling out of formation and rocketing nearly vertical until it pierces the knife-gray sky and disappears. When the sound of their engines fades, it&amp;#039;s replaced by sobs and gasping, women with their hands held to their faces and men with their chins on their heaving chests, until that sound, too, is replaced by rifle fire ringing through the trees. Then there is more walking, toward a shelter near the cold-seeming bunker, the Columbarium, filled with wrung-out heroes. Under that canopy, there are prayers recited, hymns played, and the elaborate folding of the flag by boy-faced sailors. Once it&amp;#039;s a perfect triangle, it is presented to one of the old man&amp;#039;s six middle-aged children, Paul, the heat of his tears fogging his glasses. A solemn-faced sailor with many medals shining on his chest approaches Paul and leans in. &amp;quot;On behalf of the president of the United States,&amp;quot; he begins, but the rest of his words of condolence nobody seems able to hear. A bugler squeezes out taps, at last melting even an astronaut&amp;#039;s heart, especially after the notes echo across the scorched grass and run into the same song being played for different men, for Bradford, Flattley, and Lee. Again there is rifle fire, three more shots. And at last the family is left alone to say goodbye, to place the ashes where they will stay, locked away in that bunker, in accordance with their humble wishes that the final home of their father and grandfather never become a shrine. There will be no gravestone for strangers to run their fingers over, no bronze plaque on which to leave pennies until they are blackened by the sun. If there is going to be a place to commune with the old man&amp;#039;s spirit, to come to know what he knew, this will not be it. On April 19, 2006, Scott Crossfield woke up early, packed his bags, and ate a bowl of oatmeal in his room at Brett Hall on the sprawling Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. His friend Judy Rice picked him up at seven o&amp;#039;clock. The roads were empty, and they were at the airport in nearby Prattville within twenty minutes; he hoped to be in the air by eight.  Rice asked him whether he had slept well, and he said that he always did. She also asked him whether he had taken a look at the forecast. He told her that there were a few storm clouds brewing up north, a hiccup between him and his home airfield in Manassas, Virginia. But they didn&amp;#039;t look like much of a splutter, and even if they became something more, he could work his way around them. &amp;quot;They might even give me a push,&amp;quot; he said. He thought the trip would take him a little less than four hours, and he would be walking through his front door in time for lunch. In hangar 19, Crossfield completed his preflight ritual. He ran his hands along the skin of his plane, a vintage Cessna 210A, white with green-and-yellow trim; he curled his fingers around its flaps and rudder, gingerly working their hinges; he loaded his luggage into its compartment, put his flight bag on the front passenger seat, and laid some cookies, a banana, and a jug of Gatorade on the back. The airport&amp;#039;s manager, a lined, quiet man with a gray mustache named Ray Hill, tugged the plane out onto the ramp. Together he and Crossfield checked its oil and fuel levels and gave it another walk-around, like two old cowboys admiring a horse. &amp;quot;You wouldn&amp;#039;t know he done all those things he&amp;#039;s supposed to have done,&amp;quot; Hill would later recall. Crossfield looked up at the sky. The ceiling was low. He mentioned to Hill some of his plane&amp;#039;s eccentricities, which included sticky landing gear. It had worked perfectly for the last while, since the Cessna&amp;#039;s annual maintenance, but just to be safe, Crossfield decided that he would wait for the clouds to lift, so that Hill and Rice could see if his wheels went up, and if not, he could return to the ground without too much bother. Once, he had been the first man to fly twice and three times the speed of sound. The machines he piloted hang today, like mobiles, from the ceiling of the National Air and Space Museum, a short walk from the front steps of the Capitol dome. Even now, fifty years removed from their sonic history and coated with a thin layer of dust, they are beautiful. Crossfield would sometimes make the trip to the museum and look up at them, remembering first the Douglas D-558-II, shining white and rivetless, and next the sinister-looking X-15, which he first drew on the back of an envelope.  Although his fame came from his flying, from his cameo in The Right Stuff as Chuck Yeager&amp;#039;s rival and foil,and from his years spent breaking in the precursors to moon rockets, he was also a designer and an engineer and an inventor. The first high-altitude full-pressure suit--built to keep a pilot&amp;#039;s blood from spitting out bubbles of nitrogen, filling his lungs with a crippling pink froth--sprung from Crossfield&amp;#039;s head and hands. The perches of some of the most advanced aircraft of the early space age were modeled after the tractor seats he had settled into as a child.  But nothing else he ever did came close to his X-15, which he guided from the back of that envelope to a then-record 88,116 feet, the edge of space. Looking at it today, tied down and static, it&amp;#039;s hard to imagine where it has been and what it once represented, and it&amp;#039;s harder still to picture the old man as a young one, his helmet ricocheting off the cockpit&amp;#039;s canopy as he pushed closer and closer to oblivion. Even a trip to the desert doesn&amp;#039;t much help with the dreaming. The pale skies over Edwards Air Force Base in southern California--where Crossfield left behind his longest vapor trails--are still crisscrossed by our most incredible machines, Blackbirds, Nighthawks, and Raptors; they are still flown by young pilots who develop a respect for wind shear and wake turbulence that borders on the mystical; those pilots still risk becoming the latest in a long string of Class-A mishaps, bogeyspeak for smoking holes in the ground. And yet there is less swagger in them than in the great, lead-bellied ghosts of the past. They have stopped drinking and smoking and carousing and riding horses and racing along empty highways on their motorcycles and in their Corvettes. They have waived romance for reason. They are far more likely to retire to a lounge with textbooks and a cup of coffee than to some dusty desert bar with black-and-white photographs of dead pilots on the wall. But in those photographs, shaken crooked and sometimes loose by sonic booms, there were lessons--the same lessons held by museums and smoking holes in the ground--that storied men like Scott Crossfield learned early on. They knew and accepted and even relished the fact that for all of our glories, there will be failures; that for all of our firsts, there will be lasts. Come nine o&amp;#039;clock, there still wasn&amp;#039;t all that much distance between Crossfield and the low sky, but he was mindful of having to clear fifty miles by ten o&amp;#039;clock. President Bush was flying into Tuske-gee that morning, and to keep the skies open for Air Force One, there would be no other flights allowed in its vicinity during a four-hour block, until two o&amp;#039;clock in the afternoon. Crossfield couldn&amp;#039;t wait that long, not wanting to risk flying after dark, his night vision one of the few casualties of his aging. It was his time to go. He shook Hill&amp;#039;s hand and gave Rice a hug and stepped up into his plane, as he had done hundreds of times. &amp;quot;Promise me you&amp;#039;ll never change,&amp;quot; Crossfield called out to Rice before latching shut the door. He completed his run-up, firing the mags to full power and testing the flaps. At last, he raced toward the end of the runway, heading due west, before lifting over the trees and making a gentle turn to the right. His wheels rose smoothly. Rice and Hill watched him climb until he pierced a knife-gray sky and disappeared.  Crossfield settled into a seat that, for him, had become as comfortable as a barstool. He set his course north-northeast, aiming just west of Atlanta, where air-traffic controllers watched him become another dot on their screens.  The last time he saw Virginia was on the cool, early Monday morning of April 17. He kissed Alice, his wife of sixty-three years, closed the front door behind him, eased himself into his rattling red pickup, and drove from his home in Herndon, across the street from the school that had been named after him, to the airfield in nearby Manassas. It is big enough to have a control tower rising above the lush green but not so big as to host commercial flights. Instead, rows of small planes are tied down and covered over like winter crops, and a little restaurant serves pancakes to hungry pilots, fresh from the hard labor of flying planes that won&amp;#039;t do the flying for you. Like a lot of small airports, Manassas feels slightly battered, as though it had just been pockmarked by hailstones, but that same feeling lends it a softness somehow, the ground almost supple. During the Second Battle of Bull Run in 1862, more than twenty thousand men were killed or wounded in the surrounding fields. But for those who keep their planes here, Manassas means letting out a quick, short, sometimes subconscious breath, having made it back alive. Crossfield made a pit stop at the tiny, tin-walled shop on Observation Road, not far from the gate that protects the private hangars. The Manassas Aviation Center has shelves filled with quarts of oil, flight manuals, filters, batteries, and baseball caps. A shy, dark-haired woman named Sue, who called Crossfield &amp;quot;my sweetie,&amp;quot; sold him three different charts, maps tailor-made for skyscraping. Lined up, they would cover his flight path to Alabama with geography to spare, documenting the obstacles between him and safety, power lines and radio antennas and water towers and the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. So armed, Crossfield drove through the gate to his hangar, unblocked his plane, tugged it outside, and replaced it with his truck. He loaded his bags, his laptop computer, some fruit and snacks, and a drink into his plane. Then, as he always did, he took a step back to survey it.  Like the airfield, his Cessna 210A looked a little battered. Forty-five years old, it was the first run of a new model, fresh from the factory in Wichita, Kansas, in December 1960, the same year Crossfield broke Mach 3. He liked that about it, and he liked that it looked flown, maintained but not coddled, washed only by the rain. &amp;quot;Well, it&amp;#039;s mine, and it&amp;#039;s paid for&amp;quot; was his standard response when asked about his feelings for it. He tried to pretend that it was just another of his life&amp;#039;s machines--certainly no D-558-II and nothing like the X-15. But the truth was, the old man had grown more tender about his old plane the older they had grown together. If it wasn&amp;#039;t love that was shared between them, there was at least an understanding. During his middle years, after Edwards, after other men had flown faster than him, Crossfield stopped flying altogether. It wasn&amp;#039;t a vicious breakup, a priest storming out of his church. He had just convinced himself that he had done what he needed to do. And so for twenty years, one of the nation&amp;#039;s most accomplished pilots wasn&amp;#039;t a pilot at all. But during an otherwise ordinary morning in the late 1980s, Alice Crossfield looked across the kitchen table at her husband and said, &amp;quot;If you don&amp;#039;t start flying again now, you never will.&amp;quot; Spurred, Crossfield asked a friend of his, the owner of a Taylorcraft, if he could take a shot at flying his plane, just to see if he still had the gift for it. The friend agreed, and the first man to fly twice and three times the speed of sound settled into the seat, two decades after he had last roared an engine to life, pointed himself down the center of the runway, and lifted into the sky. It was as though he had never left it. His fire rekindled, Crossfield bought his Cessna 210A. It was not beautiful and it was not perfect. Its sticky landing gear, especially, was the sort of quirk that pilots would call &amp;quot;personality.&amp;quot; Over the years, he had the instrument panel updated and the latest in navigation technology bolted on, but he refused to have an autopilot installed. Crossfield hand-flew his plane, in constant touch with its wants and needs. He was so intent on keeping that steady connection that he rarely even invited anyone to sit in the seat beside him, lest they try to cut in. Over his thousands of hours spent aloft in that weathered Cessna, he told an interviewer a few years ago, he flew solo for all but about fifty of them. He didn&amp;#039;t want anything or anyone to get between him and his plane and his plane and the air and the air and the universe. Down to his final departure from Manassas, flying for Scott Crossfield remained a solitary, intimate pursuit. Whenever he lifted off, it was as though, through his hospital-green headset, he could hear music written only for him.  Judy Rice--an outreach director for the Civil Air Patrol, the Air Force&amp;#039;s volunteer wing--was waiting for him in Alabama. She had arranged a private hangar, number 19, for his Cessna, at the end of a barnlike row. His eyesight wasn&amp;#039;t what it had once been, forcing him to wear glasses, and a good chunk of his hearing had been blasted into nothingness by afterburners and centrifuges, but in most ways, Rice thought Crossfield had aged well. He was sharp, funny, and hale. He had a speech to give the next morning, to an incoming class of officer recruits. But in the meantime, he would talk with Rice about his hopes for one of his pet projects, the National Conference on Aviation and Space Education, or NCASE. Rice, a curly-haired spark plug, organized the biannual gathering of teachers and pilots designed to help expose students to the wonders of flight. This year&amp;#039;s event was scheduled for October in Arlington, and as always, one of its highlights would be the presentation of an award named for Crossfield, given to an exceptional aerospace teacher every year. The next morning, Crossfield headed to the expansive, crowded Polifka Auditorium, where, standing behind a podium next to an American flag, he told his audience of new lieutenants stories of the desert in the fifties and sixties. He did so not to brag but to open their eyes to what their decision to join the Air Force had made possible. He had devoted nearly his entire life to flying--since he had first learned how as a twelve-year-old, in exchange for delivering the Long Beach Press-Telegram to the airport owner in Wilmington, California--and his love for it seemed limitless. His long career began during World War II as a fighter pilot and instructor in the Navy. In 1950, he joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), NASA&amp;#039;s predecessor. He was a civilian pilot by then, lined up alongside big-chested professional horsebreakers like Yeager. In family portraits, he was always the man at the end of the row, wearing a suit and a skinny tie, with his black hair oiled back; when he first showed up for work at the High Speed Flight Research Station at Edwards, he looked as though he were there to pick away at the boundaries of astronautics with a pencil, not a plane. But because he didn&amp;#039;t have the same restrictions placed on him as the military fliers did, he was, in fact, among the most daring of those brass-balled men.  Crossfield battled with lawyers, actuaries, and administrators nearly as often as he pitted himself against the sound barrier. (Later they would even try to stop him from flying to work in his Beech Bonanza, in case he crashed it instead of an X-1 or an XF-92 and wasted his life; he kept flying it anyway.) He raced Yeager for first glories and lost, but on November 20, 1953, he won redemption, becoming the first man to fly Mach 2, more than thirteen hundred miles per hour, in the D-558-II, better known as the Skyrocket, pushing past its theoretical top speed by 25 percent.  In 1955, Crossfield left NACA to join North American Aviation as a pilot and design consultant. Not long after, he was struck by perhaps his greatest inspiration, sketching out his breakthrough design for the X-15. It was the sort of fantastic machine we&amp;#039;re too practical and gutless to dream up today, a sleek black monster that, he hoped, might one day catapult him into space. He saw it built and took it on its first glides and powered flights. He crashed it once, during an emergency landing after an engine exploded in flight, breaking it in half, but he also secretly pushed it past Mach 3, a trick he only whispered about for years after, because it violated his contract. Along the way, he was given trophies by President Kennedy and, in 1965, became one of the charter inductees into the International Aerospace Hall of Fame. Two years later, he quit North American having never become an astronaut--and believing, as he would for the rest of his life, that the nation&amp;#039;s sudden turn away from rocket planes to capsules ultimately undermined our progress in space--but secure in his position as a hero of the golden age of aviation. He spent the remainder of his career working for Eastern Air Lines, Hawker Siddeley Aviation, and even for Congress, serving as a technical consultant to the House Committee on Science and Technology, tackling problems such as air-traffic congestion. Until his retirement in 1993--and even after, in less official capacities--he remained almost single-minded in his commitment to flight. Crossfield climbed to eleven thousand feet, passed along from sector to sector by Atlanta. It&amp;#039;s impossible to know what he could see through the breaks in the cloud deck. Perhaps he caught sight of the Frontier Yarns plant in Wetumpka; the mobile homes of Central; the Alabama National Guard Armory in Goodwater; the silver dome of the Clay County courthouse, wrapped in bunting for its centennial; the cemetery in Ashland, dotted with plastic flowers to mark sadder anniversaries; the white water tower with the heart painted on it in Lineville; the flat red roof of the Stinky Chicken Farm in Barfield; the Department of Transportation yard in Heflin; the peace symbol mown into the green hillside in Fruithurst; the brown rivers of Talla-poosa as he chugged across into Georgia; the steam rising out of the massive cooling towers near Stilesboro. Even if he saw none of those things, he almost certainly saw the rich vine country of Alabama melt into dun flatlands, invaded by the bedroom communities west of Atlanta. He almost certainly saw those flatlands begin lifting and folding and rolling into creases that would become foothills on their way to becoming mountains. And he almost certainly saw himself as an old man turned young again.  We can know, too, what he did not see from his height. He did not see the junked cars on overgrown front lawns; the one-pump filling stations and cracks in the sidewalk; the dump sites and mud puddles and tumbled barns; stray dogs and roadkill, flattened armadillos mostly; the hollers with their moonshine stills and dope fields; the downtowns with their boarded-up pharmacies and shoe stores; the suburban strip malls and Cracker Barrels; foreclosure notices on front doors; the abattoirs, glue factories, and burning pits; the countless billboards for radio stations, boat motors, furniture outlets, fast-food joints, high school football teams, and Baptist churches announcing GOD KNOWS WHEN YOU WERE HERE LAST. He didn&amp;#039;t see all of those things, just as he didn&amp;#039;t see the thin storm clouds ahead of him turning into something else entirely.  The day before, his speech had been good enough to ignite something in him, and he had asked Rice to take him back to the airport after lunch. There, he opened the hangar doors and stepped into the semidarkness, just an old man who wanted to spend some quiet time with his old plane. He ran his hand over its sides, as though smoothing the wrinkles in a blanket; gave the control surfaces a friendly nudge; opened and closed the baggage compartment and doors. Not long before his flight down, he had replaced the original twin-blade propeller with a triple--earned in exchange for giving another talk--and now he looked at it squarely in the nose, his face reflected in the one surface of his plane that was still polished. Crossfield must have felt he needed to give his Cessna a little more love, because he bought a quart of oil and left it unopened inside of his plane, as if in tribute, just to sweeten it up. &amp;quot;In case I might need it in the morning,&amp;quot; he said. And then he and Rice suddenly talked about dying, perhaps because they were both pilots, and every pilot is chased by the knowledge that for all of their firsts, there will be a last. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t want to go out in my bathtub, and I don&amp;#039;t want to go out in my bed,&amp;quot; Crossfield told her. &amp;quot;I want to go out in my plane.&amp;quot; Because of a &amp;quot;convectively enhanced disturbance&amp;quot; over Arkansas and because of local surface-based instability and diurnal heating, because of the moon or the sun or the tides or the stars, those thin storm clouds were being called to order in the Tennessee Valley. They were about to be fattened and fortified and united in their anger, and they were now beginning their charge toward Georgia, leaving lightning strikes and great pools of rain in their wake. They were destined to become, for so many reasons or for no good reason at all, what meteorologists call a Level 6 thunderstorm, the top of the scale. And what&amp;#039;s more, they had become a Level 6 thunderstorm south of the Mason-Dixon line, and every southern storm, even in springtime, feels as though it has a dash of hurricane in it. In small towns like Ludville, Ranger, and Fairmount, nestled among the trees and the mountains and the rich red earth, this was not going to be the sort of storm that makes you reach for an umbrella. This was going to be the sort of storm that makes you wonder what you had done wrong.  Perhaps it was Atlanta&amp;#039;s spring haze that hid it from him. Perhaps he thought he could outrace it. Perhaps he thought he had waited in Prattville long enough for it to have passed in front of him, and now he planned on sneaking back behind it. Perhaps he didn&amp;#039;t know how bad it was. Perhaps he thought that no matter how bad it was, he could ride it out. Whatever his thinking, Crossfield flew into the heart of it. Satellite images from that morning show a wide, swirling mass of cloud, thunderheads grown tall enough to leave shadows seen from space. They show enough for us to know that a small plane caught inside of it would have been tempting a Class-A mishap. There isn&amp;#039;t much less material in a jumbo jet&amp;#039;s passenger door than there is in an entire Cessna. The even more significant difference, of course, is the one that divides jet engines from propellers. Most small planes won&amp;#039;t hump along much faster than an opened-up sedan. They don&amp;#039;t slice through the sky so much as they are at the mercy of it. Inside big storms, particularly top-of-the-scale storms, particularly top-of-the-scale southern storms over mountains, the turbulence can knock a small plane to pieces. There are harrowing stories from pilots who have survived pitched battles for their lives in a nearly perfect blackness. Visibility is zero. Rain and hail bounce off windows and sometimes shatter them. No longer in their pilots&amp;#039; hands, planes are slammed to the bottom of air pockets hard enough to feel as though they&amp;#039;ve hit ground, and next they are pushed high into the atmosphere and back down again, rising and falling through thousands of feet in seconds and minutes. Sometimes they are even flipped upside down, forced into barrel rolls by the winds whistling around them. All the pilot can do is try to stay level and hope to come out of it. He might also try to turn around. Crossfield did. His last communication with air-traffic control was a request to make a 180 degree turn.  Seconds later, at the Atlanta Air Route Traffic Control Center, a dot disappeared from radar screens, and an anonymous controller suddenly felt sick to his stomach. Whenever that happens, phones start to ring. They rang in police stations and firehouses and eventually in the offices and homes of members of the Civil Air Patrol&amp;#039;s search-and-rescue teams, volunteers who give up their weekends to learn the hard art of finding lost planes. Most ominously, the phone also rang in the Chicago office of a man named Todd Fox, an accident investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board. After he had hung up, he read back his hastily jotted notes. A little after nine o&amp;#039;clock that morning, a Cessna 210A, call sign N6579X, had taken off from Prattville, Alabama, bound for Manassas, Virginia. At precisely 11:10 A.M. local time, at fifty-five hundred feet--half of its normal cruising altitude--the plane suddenly had made itself scarce in northwestern Georgia, in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. A thunderstorm was still bending trees in the region. There was no word yet on how many people were aboard the plane, but it was registered to an eighty-four-year-old man named Scott Crossfield.  Fox stared hard at the name. He knew it immediately. He also knew, better than most, what thunderstorms did to small planes, and he made plans to fly to Georgia. After Crossfield lost contact, from those last seconds on in, there can never be certainties. What if he had turned sooner? What if the president hadn&amp;#039;t been flying into Tuskegee and Crossfield had left Prattville a few hours later? What if his night vision hadn&amp;#039;t left him? What if the storm had stayed thin? That is not the end of the wondering. Crossfield had been in tough spots before--hell, he&amp;#039;d been in tough spots no other pilot had been in before--and perhaps he thought he could get out of this tough spot, too. Perhaps he knew he wouldn&amp;#039;t find escape but decided he wasn&amp;#039;t going down without a flght, straight-armed, &amp;quot;Aw, shit.&amp;quot; Perhaps he knew there was nothing for him to do, and he closed his eyes and waited for gravity&amp;#039;s inevitable embrace. Perhaps he thought of his family; perhaps he thought of the desert; perhaps he thought of how high and fast he had flown in his life; perhaps he thought of what might be done with his ashes; perhaps he didn&amp;#039;t have time to think of anything but the trees and the mountains and the rich red earth. Late the next morning, after the weather had cleared, a search plane spotted what looked like a door lying flat in a field. It was white with green-and-yellow trim. And then, perhaps a mile away, a helicopter crew saw what looked like wreckage on a steep slope, sheltered by hardwoods that sought the cool of the valley floor. In turn, the search plane guided the Civil Air Patrol&amp;#039;s ground team--a mechanic named Jim Weed, a salesman named Keith Dickerson, an IT guy named William Hale--calling them forward through the woods, first left and then right, until they found what they were looking for, this crumpled thing another part of them had hoped they would never find. The old plane was upside down and inside out, its tail snapped off and flipped back over itself. One of the bladders that had held its gas had been thrown clear; already the forest undergrowth had been killed by their spilled fuel. The floor pan rose silver out of the top of the debris. One of the wings poked out, too, as did some flashes of seat upholstery. There were flight charts to Alabama and back strewn about, as were two of the three propeller blades, twisted. Tangled in the wreckage were the roots of some nearby trees that had been exposed when a mound of dirt had been pushed up. Above them there was a hole in the forest canopy, but not a big one. When Todd Fox looked up at the blue sky through it, he decided that the hole had been made by a Cessna 210A traveling nearly vertical. He measured the impact crater and found that it was four feet deep, and that mean figure confirmed his suspicions. Worse fears were also confirmed, this time by the coroner. There were no passengers--because there hardly ever were--but the body of an eighty-four-year-old man named Scott Crossfield was found not in his bathtub or in his bed but in his plane. What remained of his Cessna was carried out of the woods and hauled to a nearby Department of Transportation yard, where Fox did his best to make it whole again. So much of it was so far gone that it would never again look like a plane. Instead, by Fox&amp;#039;s eyes, it was a jigsaw puzzle, and he did his best to ferret out its four corners, connect them with edge pieces, and fill the void in the middle. After he was finished, there were pieces still missing: Parts of the right elevator and the plane&amp;#039;s third propeller blade have never been found. But the cables that ran between the controls and the rudder and flaps had not been cut; the wings had not fallen off; there had not been a fire. The machine was looking blameless, aside from the fact that it had been unable to hold itself together, coming apart over the course of one last, long mile, first shedding its door into a field. Behind a warehouse filled with spare parts from carcasses picked clean, a soft-spoken, blue-eyed man named Todd Thaxton tends to neat rows of wrecked planes. He and his team at Atlanta Air Recovery in suburban Griffin, Georgia, have pulled them out of treetops and dragged them down from snow-covered peaks and raised them from their watery graves. Today, there are more than one hundred of them out back, big and small, damaged and destroyed; they share only their having taken last flights. The worst of the current inventory--the Chalk&amp;#039;s Ocean Airways seaplane that lost a wing and splashed down off Miami Beach last year, taking twenty souls to the bottom with it--suffocates the weeds struggling to grow out from under its belly. There are also shattered Cessnas and Pipers, Bonanzas and Mooneys, their fragments sometimes covered by stomach-turning tarps, stacked high in trailers and wooden crates lined up like tombstones. Last week alone, Thaxton picked up the pieces of seven planes, brought them back to Griffin, and laid them out under the sun. They will be held here indefinitely, gone over by accident investigators, insurance agents, liability lawyers, and family members and friends of the lost pilots and passengers. If a lawsuit is filed by those left behind, the plane will stay here for years, sometimes decades. If not, Thaxton will wait for word from the accident investigators to release  the plane, either back to the insurance company or to the recyclers, depending on its condition. Downed planes are our modern-day buffalo, every scrap put to use. Not long after Fox had begun his investigation, he had his jigsaw puzzle moved here. But Crossfield&amp;#039;s plane had a relatively short stay, a little less than three months, sandwiched between a crushed helicopter flipped on its side and the boxed-up debris left over from a calamitous wreck in Graniteville, South Carolina. After Fox put the Cessna back together for a second time, double-checking--and leaving the storm looking like his only culprit--he released it in early July. Paul Crossfield made the long trip to Griffin and stared down at what had become the first of his father&amp;#039;s caissons, spread out at his feet. With Thaxton&amp;#039;s help, he found the data plate--a small silver tab riveted to the side of every plane, stamped with its make, model, and serial number--and pried free some of the instruments. He put them into a cardboard box, carried the box back to his car, and drove away. Thaxton surveyed what was left of the machine and shook his head. He dumped Scott Crossfield&amp;#039;s final plane into a rust-colored boxcar trailer waiting in the parking lot. A recycler hauled it away, using a shredder to separate the steel from the aluminum, sold for scrap, gone to make soda cans and siding. Within days, a different plane had taken its place in the yard, this one white with brown trim. The buffalo business has never had much room for sentiment. Nor, on this overcast August afternoon, does Arlington National Cemetery, or its buglers, or its white horses and boy-faced sailors. Two o&amp;#039;clock arrives, and it&amp;#039;s time for Daily, Kirkpatrick, Ratcliff, and Strausser to be honored, but only until three o&amp;#039;clock, when four more men wait their turn. If there is going to be a place to commune with the old man&amp;#039;s spirit, to come to know what he knew, this will not be it. It will not be found in the National Air and Space Museum, either, or at a tiny tin-walled shop near an empty hangar in Manassas, or in the featureless California desert, or along the single runway in Prattville, or in a field of wrecked planes in Griffin, or in a smokeless hole in the ground bordered by Ludville, Ranger, and Fairmount, made off-limits to the curious by posted warning of the Black Knob Hunt Club.  The truth is, there is only one such place. A small plane lifts off the ground, intimate and solitary, the voices crackling through the headset having been turned off, finally flying low and steady due north, toward the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, today under blue skies, making the shadows short, the ridges lit up bright and shining, blanketed with pine trees, interrupted only every so often by ribbons of hardwoods nestled in the cool of the valleys, running between the bush-hugging farms and the brown rivers, looking from here like such a fine and soft place to come back down to earth. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a147/esq1106flyboy-160/>