From the Canard avaitor's list…..
"I received a cell phone call from a friend at KSUS (St. Louis Spirit) this afternoon at about 1:35 pm. He was upset and could hardly say what had just seen. From his open hangar he witnessed a mutual friend on down wind leg suddenly pitch up, roll nearly inverted and disappear behind an adjacent row of hangers in what appeared to be 45 degree dive. He said we just lost Olie.

Olie is one of the guys in a local group messing around with experimental airplanes, he was trying to get the one and only metal built VariViggin to fly with a Mazda rotary engine. This was the second or third time Olie had attempted to fly the airplane in the past several years. It was a beautiful machine copied from original drawings and built by a couple engineers in Canada and painted like a Blue Angel F-18. Olie bought it and had it trucked in. We were in total shock and not feeling well at all about this happening to a guy we knew so well.

I was really in the dumps when the phone rang again about 20 minutes later. It was the same friend calling to say local guys were reporting Olie was walking around the wreckage which was up in a tree. I said, this is the best phone call I have ever received, wow!

I had Olie's cell phone number and called him. Sure enough, he was alive and well, and I said man am I glad to hear your voice. He said things happened real quick and he would brief everyone as soon as possible, meanwhile he was waiting for the FAA and also looking for a ride back to the airport. (he may not have been aware of it, but there was quite a traffic jam developing on Airport Road as a number of people saw him go in, one said he couldn't believe he was not killed, all this on a local TV web site)

This evening I received more info on what happened. The engine quit at about 90 knots on down wind leg and the airplane pitched up immediately, probably due to a high thrust line, speed dropped off to about 70, and the machine rolled nearly inverted about that quick. Olie said "some basic instinct kicked in - I pushed the nose down trying to recover some speed and kicked rudder real hard trying to get the airplane to roll back up right" - it did just that before it hit the trees. He climbed down with hardly a scratch.

We are thankful our friend Olie is with us tonight...."