Fact #104097

On July 31, 1964 Reeves and Dean Manuel left Batesville, Arkansas en route to Nashville, having just secured a deal on some property. He had also unsuccessfully tried to buy property from the LaGrone family in Deadwood, Texas, north of his birthplace of Galloway. While flying over Brentwood, they encountered a violent thunderstorm which proved more than a match for the tiny, single-engined Beechcraft 'Debonair' aircraft. The plane faded from the radar screens at around 1702 hrs, and all radio contact with the craft was lost. One of the major causes of the crash was deemed to have been that the small airplane had become caught in the centre of the thunderstorm and that Reeves had become disoriented by "pilot's vertigo", which would have resulted in his not realizing in which direction the plane was travelling, be it up, down, left or right. [In a bizarre twist of fate, both Reeves and Randy Hughes, the pilot of Patsy Cline's ill-fated plane, were trained by the same instructor.] It is now understood that Reeves was, in fact, flying the plane upside down and he assumed he was raising the craft some distance in an attempt to clear the path of the storm. This action, however, disastrously (and fatally) resulted in his taking the airplane instead downward and straight to the ground. This would have explained why, when the wreckage was eventually found some 42 hours later, the engine and nose of the plane were buried deep in the earth due to the tremendous impact of the stricken craft hitting the ground. The crash site is situated in a wooded area NNE of Brentwood roughly at the junction of Baxter Lane and Franklin Pike Circle just east of US interstate 65 and SW of Nashville international airport where he was seeking to land. On the morning of August 2, 1964, after an agonizing and intense search (aided by such people as Chet Atkins, Eddy Arnold, Stonewall Jackson and Ernest Tubb) the bodies of Jim Reeves and Dean Manuel were found amongst the wreckage of the shattered plane."