I was six years old when it happened, and until recently I thought perhaps my memory had confused old dreams with real events. But poking around the internet finally paid off.

An Army plane really did crash just outside of Solvay. It was returning to the airstrip in Amboy, about two miles northwest of the village. The airstrip was part of what was then the Syracuse airport; during World War II it was also part of the Syracuse Army air base.

It was Sunday night, July 2, 1944; my parents and I were watching a movie at Craig's (aka the Community) Theater on Milton Avenue. My one-year-old sister, Mary Beth, was at home with my grandmother, who lived next door to us.

Suddenly we heard the roar of engines as a plane flew overhead. I'd never heard that sound while inside the movie theater, which meant the plane must have been flying very low. Seconds later the theater went dark and then someone summoned us outside.

There was nothing to see, but someone who had been outside the theater said the low-flying plane appeared to have struck the top of the tallest building in the village, a 19-story structure that was part of the sprawling Solvay Process Company complex across the street.

There is no mention in the stories below, but I believe the plane did hit either a flagpole or an antenna on a tower atop that Solvay Process building before it crashed in a field well short of the airstrip. As years went by, my mind somehow linked this incident with one that occurred in 1945 when a B-25 bomber hit the Empire State Building between the 79th and 80th floors, and killed 14 people.

And while the stories below indicate otherwise, security was nonexistent a couple of days later when my uncle Bill Smolinski took my cousins and I to the crash site and we freely walked around looking for pieces of the plane. We actually walked off with at least one. It's another of a zillion or so examples of how the world has changed in the past 65 years. Today a military or civilian police official would have prevented people from even parking their vehicles near the scene.

In 1944 there were several accidents in New York State involving military airplanes and pilots in training. Most of the crashes involved the C-47, considered one of the most reliable transport planes ever built. However, some of those used for training purposes were relatively old and well-worn. Many of the pilots were inexperienced, perhaps the same was true of the mechanics who serviced the planes.

Bigger considerations, at least for those crashes that caught my eye, were the terrain and the Central New York weather, which is strongly influenced by Lake Ontario, notorious for its effect on winter storms. From November through April, Central New York often resembles the Arctic.

Even during the rest of the year flying conditions are often poor, particularly over Lake Ontario and the Adirondack Mountains. The top half of New York State – the area north of the present-day Thruway – can be scarier than the Bermuda Triangle. Certainly this was true in 1944 for pilots on nighttime training flights.

Here's a summary of other plane crashes I found:

Friday, June 23:
To me, this is the most interesting, for several reasons, starting with the fact it occurred about a mile from my family's favorite vacation destination, Sandy Pond. A C-47 transport went into Lake Ontario near Montario Point about 2 p.m. The two-man crew, Lt. Frederick Frenger, pilot, and Lt. Curtis L. Aultman, co-pilot, were rescued, thanks to area residents, led by Mr. and Mrs. Elwin Kast, who were painting their barn a few miles away when they heard the plane's engines. A few seconds later, when the plane hit the water, the Kasts, who couldn't see the plane, mistook the sound for an explosion.

The Kasts immediately phoned the marina at nearby Greene Point on Sandy Pond. An inboard speedboat belonging to Gilbert Whipple of Endicott was gassed up and ready to go when Mr. and Mrs. Kast arrived. The couple got into the boat with three others, Mrs. Robert Sawyer, Miss Clairene Greene and Miss Faith Sawyer. Whipple remained at Greene Point after giving Miss Sawyer a short lesson on how to start the motor. She then drove the boat through the Sandy Pond channel and out into Lake Ontario to search for the plane.

There was a heavy mist hanging over the lake. The rescue party later told a weekly local newspaper, The Sandy Creek News, that they spotted what appeared to be two ducks, who turned out to be the pilot and co-pilot trying to swim toward land. In fact they were swimming parallel to a beach they couldn't see.

In any event, the rescue party assisted the two men into the boat and took them to Greene Point where Mrs. Faith Greene and neighbors had blankets and hot coffee waiting. A local doctor, H. L. Hollis, had already been contacted, as had the Syracuse Airbase about 60 miles away. An ambulance was sent from the airbase, arriving about 90 minutes later.

According to Frenger and Aultman, they were flying one of the oldest planes at the air base on what was supposed to be a routine low altitude training flight when one of the engines began throwing oil.

"The right engine cut out — that's all I remember," explained Lt. Frenger. With Lt. Aultman at the controls, the men fought to gain altitude with only one engine, but found it impossible.

Lt. Frenger, 25, was uninjured, Lt. Aultman, 22, suffered a cut on his scalp.

In the weeks that followed there were efforts to find the plane, but it went down in an area where I believe the Lake Ontario bottom makes an abrupt drop. Coast Guard crews that looked for the plane thought they'd find it in an area where the lake was about 25 feet deep, but found nothing, concluding the plane was in much deeper water. (During one vacation at Sandy Pond, I was advised by a cottage owner to go fishing off Montario Point. He claimed he had done so in a spot not too far from shore where he estimated the lake was about 75 feet deep.)

Storms in this area are often brutal, making the lake angry and very rough. It is thought the lake wasted little time tearing the C-47 apart. Pieces of the plane soon showed up on the long stretch of beach on the Sandy Pond peninsula, both north and south of the channel, but as far as I know, most of the C-47 was never found.

Friday, July 7:
Three flight officers from the Syracuse Army Air Base were killed when their C-47 transport plane crashed into Oneida Lake, near Constantia. (For those not familiar with the area, Oneida Lake, a fisherman's paradise, is a large body of fresh water a few miles northeast of Syracuse.)

The victims were 2nd Lieut. Robert Allen Baiser, 20, of Delphi, Indiana; 2nd Lieut. Gene Norman Meyer, 20, of Dayton, Ohio, and 2nd Lieut. George William Kelley, 24, of Rochester, New York. There was no one else aboard.

The plane came down about 10:30 p.m. and exploded upon impact about 1,000 feet from shore. This marked the third time in three weeks that a C-47 flying out of the Syracuse Army Air Base had crashed.

Oneida is a shallow lake. This plane was located early the next day in five to 10 feet of water.

Sunday, July 16:
Two officers and three enlisted men survived when their C-47 transport plane crashed and burned about 2 p.m. on a farm less than a mile from the Cortland (NY) airport. (Cortland is a city about 30 miles south of Syracuse.)

A doctor, who happened to be passing nearby, stopped and treated a crew member whose arm was cut.

The only fatality mentioned in newspapers was a Guernsey cow that was standing in a field when it was struck by the plane and torn to pieces by a propeller. However, newspapers also said the plane had plowed through two chicken houses before it hit the cow.

Aboard the plane were 2nd Lt. Willis Arneberg, Flight Officer Harold L. Graybill; Sgt. B. Kielpopof, whose arm was cut; Pvt. Paul Spielberger and Pvt. William Rosenblum.

The plane had just taken off from the Cortland airport when it encountered problems. Witnesses on the ground reported seeing a puff of smoke just before the plane nosed downward in a gradual glide. The pilot apparently aimed for the farm field and he and his crew were able to escape the plane before it burst into flame.

The Syracuse Air Base has started using the Cortland airport for training purposes the previous week.

That same weekend five army fliers were killed when their four-engined bomber crashed on a farm in Blockville in Chautauqua County in western New York, near Jamestown. They were flying out of Topeka, Kansas. Seven crew members survived, though three were seriously injured.

Two officers suffered minor injuries on Saturday when their twin-engined Army bomber crashed while trying to take off at the Army airfield in Rome, about 50 miles east of Syracuse.