On October 30, 1959, Piedmont Airlines Flight 349, a Douglas DC-3, crashed on Bucks Elbow Mountain near Crozet, Virginia, killing the crew of three and all but one of its twenty-four passengers.

The aircraft had previously flown with Meteor Air Transport as N53593 and was sold to Piedmont Airlines in December 1956.

[2] The subsequent investigation determined the cause of the accident to be: A navigational omission which resulted in a lateral course error that was not detected and corrected through precision instrument flying procedures.

Rather than missing the one turn on their flight, the pilot and co-pilot, according to ALPA, may have been led astray by faulty radio beacons.

The ALPA report, citing numerous instances of an intermittent signal at the beacon for the Charlottesville airport, found that the beacon for a private field in Hagerstown, Maryland, could have overridden and caused the collision with the mountain.