How a retired rescue helicopter and a hot rod Mustang honor an airman

Yahoo

08-05-2025

Logan Staib was a natural-born mechanic, which his father, David, realized when Logan was 12. That was when David bought yet another classic muscle car — a 1964 Ford Falcon this time, with a 302 V-8 engine — with plans to rebuild it, before a ruptured disc in his back got in his way.
'Logan was like, 'why can't I help?'' David Staib remembers. 'And I'm like, 'you're 12, you probably could.' And so that next day, we were out in the garage. He's pulling the cylinder heads off of the 302. From there, it just kind of started.'
Early this spring, David climbed behind the wheel of another muscle car that Logan had rebuilt, this one a vintage Ford 1986 Mustang GT convertible, a version known among Mustang-heads as the final 'Fox-body' model that came with the iconic 'four-eyes' headlights. He made the day-long drive from his home outside Charlotte, North Carolina, to Moody Air Force Base in Georgia. As David parked the car next to a retired HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopter, Logan's dog tags hung from the rear-view mirror.
The two machines — the hot rod Ford and the retired helicopter — were Logan's final two projects. For the Pave Hawk — tail number 26356, built in 1991 — he had been one of the helicopter's final crew chiefs when it was retired in 2021 and put on permanent static display in Moody's air park. The Mustang was Logan's car at Moody, where he split his time between fixing and maintaining the base's fleet of rescue HH-60s during the week, and building and racing cars at a local drag strip on the weekends, sometimes hauling broken ones back and forth between his parents' houses in South Carolina when the motors blew.
In late 2022, the Air Force reassigned Logan to the 33rd Rescue Generation Squadron in Kadena Air Base, Japan, but he and David had plans to fix the Mustang up together when Logan got back.
They never got the chance.
On May 30, 2023, Logan was riding his motorcycle near the Okinawa city of Nago, Japan, when he fell and was killed.
In March, nearly two years after Logan's death, David drove Logan's Mustang to Moody, parking beside the retired HH-60 with Logan's name painted on the door as part of the aircraft's maintenance team. David slid open the big cabin door and climbed in. On the metal was the signatures of the last crew to fly 26356, and, written in Sharpie, Logan's name as the last crew chief to put the aircraft in the sky.
Sitting in the same helicopter his son had worked on was overwhelming, David said.
'It was retired and put in the air park before he was killed, so this is not something that they did because he was killed. It's just this weird chain of events,' said David. 'You just think about the odds of that helicopter being there with his name on it.'
Logan was, according to his mother, Christina Maciejewski, a boy who loved being a boy.
'As a mom, he was my baby,' Maciejewski told Task & Purpose. 'He loved fishing, working on cars, he just loved people. He was always the kind of kid who made friends with the underdogs.'
Joining the military, Christina said, was always in Logan's mind.
'Very early on, he said he wanted to go into the military,' Christine said. On Sept. 11, 2001, she said, 'we were actually on vacation, kind of watching the World Trade Towers. And I remember, I mean, he was so little because we were vacationing in September, because they weren't in school yet, and he was just like, 'they tried to blow America up.''
From that vacation on, said Christine, when Logan made crafts or projects, they had patriotic themes. 'One that stands out was a stool that he made for brushing his teeth. And it was like all red, white and blue, with flag stickers and stuff like that on it,' she said.
With a move to South Carolina, David and Christina split, but Logan soon took up his dad's habit: rebuilding cars.
Logan, David said, could figure out almost anything with gears or pumps or an engine, but unlike him, when Logan got stuck, he knew how to look stuff up on YouTube.
'He was one of those kids,' said David. 'There's like a mechanical aptitude test, and it's just a bunch of gears all mixed together. [It asks] if gear number one is spinning clockwise, what rotation is gear number 10 spinning? I mean, he would know, and not many people get that.'
After David and Christina separated, Logan lived with David. When he was 12, they got the Falcon up and running together, which led to Logan starting his own projects.
'I think the next year we got a broken down four-wheeler, and he fixed it, and then a little dirt bike, and he fixed it. And then he gets to be 14 or 15, and he buys an old Jeep, and we start working on that,' David recalled. 'Like a Daisy Duke Jeep, like one from the 70s.'
In high school, fixing fun rides wasn't enough. Logan wanted to race.
'He buys a Corvette,' David said. 'He's tearing the motor down in our garage and refusing to ask me for help.'
High school came and went, said Christina, and college didn't take, which led Logan to the Air Force in 2019. Though eager to ship out to basic training, he waited for a maintenance job to open up.
'It was his passion,' said Christina. 'I had always told my kids that old saying, like, 'if you do something you love, you'll never work a day in your life.' And that was definitely something that he wanted to do.'
After boot camp and tech school, Logan ended up at Moody in the 41st Rescue Generation Squadron, wrenching on the unit's rescue-focused HH-60s. One of his first supervisors, Miles Gravange, said Logan quickly showed the two traits his parent knew him best for: easy to make friends, and a passion for machines.
'Staib was one of the funniest guys around, but also one of the most skilled technicians,' said Gravange, now a section chief with a fighter squadron at Moody, in an Air Force release. 'When he got to the helicopter maintenance world, he was like a fish in water — he just got it. According to everyone I talked to, you didn't have to worry about the maintenance he was doing, which says a lot about the family, how they brought him up.'
On weekends, Staib would be at South Georgia Motorsports Park, just north of Moody.
'He'd go on Friday night for 'Test and Tune,' which was also what they call grudge night,' said David. 'People that you street race, that you've talked shit with, you can go there and shut them up at the track. So Friday night at the track was what Logan did.'
Other times, said Christina, Logan would bring a car to her house in Charleston to race on local tracks — and occasionally blow the motors.
'There were a couple of times we had to tow him and his car back, because he would come here, you know, blow it up, and have to get back for work,' said Christina.
For Christmas in 2020, David bought Logan a motor for the '86 Mustang the two had found in Tallahassee for $2,800, a steal by anyone's measure — in May, Autotrader listed two restored 1986 Mustang GTs for over $20,000.
He dropped the motor in, added a turbo and was soon racing it.
In 2022, Logan got orders to Japan. He had plans to swap the transmission from an automatic to a stick, and maybe add a blower, but that would have to wait until he got back.
In Japan, Logan bought a motorcycle and sent his parents pictures he took as he zoomed around the Pacific coastline.
On a ride on May 30, 2023, he was driving through a tunnel that was slick with the island's near-constant rain.
'He laid the motorcycle down, and a vehicle traveling towards him that swerved to miss the motorcycle hit him and killed him,' David said. 'The motorcycle slid away and was undamaged. Literally undamaged. It completely survived. I had all of his Air Force buddies strip it down and sell it for parts, because I didn't want it to take another life.'
On May 31 — just after Memorial Day weekend — Christina was at work. Her phone lit up with an alert from the Ring doorbell camera at her house.
On the screen, she saw three Air Force officers in uniform. She asked them through the app what they wanted.
'They said, 'can you come home?'' Christina recounted.
As she drove, her mind clung to desperate ideas.
'I thought, 'I hope he's in trouble, I hope he raced something, or did something he wasn't supposed to do,'' she remembers. 'But I knew it probably was not good.'
A month after Logan died, his sister, Peyton, living in Charleston with Christina, had a baby. She chose the middle name Riley, same as Logan's. They keep a garden out back to remember Logan by.
On David's side of the family, they got tattoos.
'Logan's big claim to fame was a TDY in Arizona, where he had gotten coined by a general,' David said. 'They all got drunk and went out hiking and they got this picture of a 40-foot cowboy cactus. I didn't even know that was such a thing. And then they all got those [cactus] tattoos on their legs. So number one, all 15 male members of my family went out and got the same tattoo.'
But the real memorial, David said, is Logan's Mustang.
'When Logan was killed, I immediately sold my drag car because I knew that his Mustang would be the last drag car I would ever own,' David said. 'I've got a lot of work ahead of me to get it where I want it.'
He would make it untouchable, aiming for 6 seconds or even 5.5 in the quarter mile, a screaming fast number if he gets it there.
'Currently, it has a full mechanical restoration, like there's literally from the radiator to the rear end. There is nothing that is used. It's a new rear end, all new suspension, all new frame, all new axles, rims, tires, block, transmission, clutch and all the safety equipment that has to go with it. And then it'll go into a body shop and get a full, you know, three, four or five coats of clear black paint job with, you know, with pin striping. And then I'll get the interior all redone, and I think I'm going to convert the interior to just all black, instead of black and gray. And then it'll sit in my garage.'
In March, David drove the Mustang to Moody to see the helicopter, tail number 26356, retired and mounted as a static display on base. The helicopter was fairly famous at Moody for a 2012 mission in which its crew had responded to a call for help from an Army Special Forces team near Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan. Maneuvering into a dusty, narrow wadi, its crew recovered an injured Afghan soldier, a rescue that earned the crew the 2012 Mackay Trophy for the 'most meritorious' mission of the year across the Air Force.
'They un-riveted the doors so that we could see in there and see the Sharpie, that my son was the last person to sign off as the last airman in charge of that helicopter,' David said.
Even getting 26356 as a permanent display at Moody had a hint of fate to it.
'Apparently, there was a general that wanted a different helicopter put out there,' David said. But others insisted, said David. ''No, this one belongs there, because it won this award and rescued these people.' And I don't know if it was because of us, but they had repainted it, redone the graphics, so his name was fresh. And so me, my wife, my mom, and all of my son's buddies that were traveling with us for this, we all got to just sign under his name to say our goodbyes.'
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