Dale Boyd Knox mystery plane crash strange ending

Piecing together a local pilot’s life and sudden death

Altamont New Scotland
August 7, 2019

Albright described it, all these years later, as “like he was saying one last goodbye.”

After waving, Albright said, the pilot “does a circle over the top of me and then boom, into the cliff.”

Dale Knox served in the military from 1952 through 1956, according to the United States Department of Veterans Affairs online records. One of his duties was to serve as a flight mechanic, his brother said, fixing planes that were on the ground or even in the air.

VOORHEESVILLE — Dale Boyd Knox of Delmar was 38, a husband and father, fire-district commissioner, military veteran, and small-business owner. He died 47 years ago when the single-engine plane he was piloting crashed into a cliff on the Helderberg escarpment in New Scotland near Thacher Park.

He was alone in his four-seater Beechcraft BE35 V-tail Bonanza at the time of his crash on April 12, 1972.

The plane’s remains still lie in the deep woods off Picard Road, and his family is still haunted by the mystery surrounding his death.

Dale Knox’s older brother, Alan Knox, remembers him as “one of the most fun-loving and hardest-working people around” and as “an all-around guy.”

“There’s a French phrase, joie de vivre,” Alan Knox said. “If ever there was somebody who enjoyed life, it was Dale.”
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