A crop duster pilot suffered major injuries Thursday morning after his aircraft struck a Basin Mediactive, LLC AM radio tower near Olene, Oregon — one of a four-tower directional array that has stood on the site since 1981, 45 years before the crash. A witness pulled the pilot from the burning wreckage before emergency crews arrived.
Pilot Gus Macy, described in local reporting as a third-generation crop duster pilot, was flying a single-engine agricultural aircraft on a pesticide application flight the morning of Thursday, August 20, 2026, when it struck the tower near Hill Road and Crystal Springs Road off Highway 140, near Olene, according to the Klamath County Sheriff’s Office.
Deputies and fire personnel were dispatched to the scene around 9:13 a.m. The aircraft crashed to the ground and caught fire. Macy suffered major injuries and was taken to Sky Lakes Medical Center for treatment. The Sheriff’s Office said in its media release that the circumstances surrounding the crash remain under investigation, with additional information to be released as it becomes available.
A nearby witness, cattle rancher Caleb Knoll, saw the plane disappear from view followed by a plume of smoke, rode a 4-wheeler roughly a mile across his family’s ranch to reach the site, and pulled Macy away from the fully engulfed aircraft before first responders arrived. Knoll told KOBI-TV NBC5 that Macy was conscious and talking, though burned, when he reached him.
A 45-year-old AM array
The array consists of four individually registered towers, each 267 feet above ground level. Tower 4 of the array was constructed January 1, 1981 — putting the array at 45 years old at the time of the crash. FCC records describe the site’s address simply as “5 mi SE of Altamont, N of Lost River,” in Klamath County, with the array centered at 42°09’42.0″N, 121°39’01.0″W.
A four-tower configuration like this is typical of a directional AM antenna array, which uses multiple towers working together to shape a station’s signal pattern — commonly to protect other stations on the same frequency or to concentrate coverage toward a population center. Basin Mediactive owns KLAD, an AM station in the Klamath Falls market, making it the likely license tied to this array, though the ASR registration itself does not list a call sign directly.
The registration lists Basin Mediactive, LLC’s address as 404 Main Street, Suite 4, Klamath Falls.
What’s still unknown
The Sheriff’s Office has said the cause of the crash will be determined by investigators from the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board, with the NTSB leading the investigation — but neither agency had issued public findings as of this writing, and no update on Macy’s condition has been released since the Sheriff’s Office statement that he was recovering from major injuries at Sky Lakes Medical Center.
Aerial application flights routinely operate at low altitude over agricultural fields, and collisions with guy wires, transmission towers and power lines remain one of the more persistent hazard categories in crop dusting. AM directional arrays are typically guyed structures, and guy wires extending outward from each tower can be difficult to see from the air, particularly at low altitude during an active spray run.
