Matt Herron, the photojournalist who came to prominence through his work covering the civil rights movement of the 1960s, died in a sailplane accident in Northern California, earlier this month. Herron was 89.
According to police, the sailplane he was flying was a MINILAK. It is a high-performance 13.5-meter class sailplane available with a retractable electric motor for self-launching. Mr. Herron learned to fly only in his 70s, local outlets reported, but he quickly became an avid pilot.
Herron left in the early afternoon for a flight to Mendocino, a distance of just over 50 miles from Lampson Field (located about 100 miles north of San Francisco), and when he never arrived there in Mendocino, a search was initiated, which authorities say was based on his known “GPS” coordinates, though it wasn’t clear how they got that data. Regardless, they soon found the crash site and the body of the pilot, which was located less than a mile north of the field he had just departed from. No one on the ground was injured.
While he was 89, Herron led an active life, and his photography from the 1960s was particularly relevant at this time of a renewed wave of civil rights protests across the country. In fact, Herron’s work, the Marin Journal Independent reported, was recently featured in a exhibition at the San Francisco Public Library.
Both the FAA and NTSB are investigating the crash.
