Allen P. Spaulding Jr., 70, was the sole occupant of the 1965 fixed-wing Maule Bee Dee M-4-210 that crashed Wednesday morning on Cuttyhunk, state police said. The pilot was determined to be dead at the scene.

State police late Wednesday identified the pilot in a fatal morning plane crash on Cuttyhunk as Allen P. Spaulding Jr., 70, of Wilmington De.

Police said the facts and circumstances surrounding the crash remain under investigation.

Mr. Spaulding, a longtime resident of Cuttyhunk, was the sole occupant of a 1965 fixed-wing Maule Bee Dee M-4-210 aircraft that crashed on a remote strip of land at the west end of the island. Cuttyhunk lies at the tip of the Elizabeth islands chain, to the west of Martha's Vineyard.

Leave your credit cards and your worries behind and hop a ferry over to Cuttyhunk, our little sister to the west. It’s an undiscovered island filled with 400 friendly summer people, beautiful wooded walks, welcoming beaches and a sense of peace and tranquility reminiscent of life in the 1950s. Or even earlier.

There is a lot more need for a Vineyard connection with Cuttyhunk these days, Dukes County Commissioners heard on a visit to the island Wednesday. Gosnold, they were told, is facing significant impact from its growing popularity as the outermost town in the Elizabeth chain of islands.

When it comes to telephone service, Cuttyhunk may be going cutting edge.

As part of a plan to upgrade service on the island, part of the town of Gosnold, Verizon has proposed putting up a 45-foot pole on town property on Tower Hill Road.

Thea Ruckhaus, 13, stepped onto the deck of the Arabella, tucked her violin under her chin, and began to play The African Reel.

In that moment, as the notes drifted across Cuttyhunk harbor, the world of cell phones and e-mail and computers drifted away, the centuries evaporated, and the Arabella's passengers were on a sailing vessel visiting a small island, cheered by a melody.

On Cuttyhunk, Sight of Godspeed Brings Joy

By JAMES KINSELLA
Gazette Senior Writer

CUTTYHUNK - Late Monday afternoon, Cuttyhunk residents were
sitting around, a popular Island pursuit, when they spied the sails of a
1600s sailing vessel nearing Penikese.

It was the Godspeed!

Residents raced down to the harbor for their boats in
unCuttyhunk-like haste.

Initially Margaret Martin thought the want ad for a Cuttyhunk schoolteacher contained a typographical error. Scouring a jobs Web site for the Cape and Islands area in the spring of 2003, she saw an entry for a school with one student. She wasn’t reassured when she traveled to Rehoboth to meet Russell Latham, the district superintendent, and found that the listed address was actually a private residence. Sensing the whole thing might be an elaborate joke, she almost drove home to Long Island.

Okay, so maybe what the residents of Cuttyhunk were doing in order to get their high-speed Internet service was not strictly legal, but goodness, it was clever. It showed, they will tell you, the sort of inventiveness that made America great.

But Comcast doesn’t see it that way. To the giant telecommunications company, what the Cuttyhunkers did was theft, pure and simple. And so they have pulled the plug on the islanders, casting them back into the dark ages, online-communications-wise.

The tiny population of Cuttyhunk has won its David and Goliath battle with Comcast. The giant telecommunications company this week reversed its decision to pull the plug on the islanders’ do-it-yourself high speed Internet service.

Cuttyhunkers are expected to rejoin the modern world within the next week, as soon as Comcast can wrap up a formal vendor agreement with the man who had developed the island’s innovative wireless network over the past five years, Mark Storek.