250 GIs Flying Home for Christmas Killed in Crash : Military’s Worst Air Disaster

A DC-8 charter jet bringing U.S. peacekeeping troops home for Christmas from the Middle East crashed and burned on takeoff from Newfoundland today, killing all 250 soldiers and eight civilian crew members aboard.

“The plane took off, got airborne (but) probably didn’t reach 1,000 feet before it crashed,” said Dan Mazankowski, Canada’s minister of transport.

It was the worst U.S. military air crash in war or peace and the seventh major airline disaster in 1985, aviation history’s worst year in terms of deaths. There have been 1,948 aviation fatalities this year, compared with 450 in all of 1984.

On Refueling Stop

Mazankowski said there were no survivors in the 6:50 a.m. crash at Gander International Airport, where the stretch DC-8 had made a refueling stop on a flight that originated in Cairo.

The soldiers--247 men and three women--had completed six months of duty in the Sinai and were headed to their airborne division base at Ft. Campbell, Ky., where relatives, officers and a military brass band were prepared to welcome them home at noon.

One witness, Boyce Jardine, 35, said he was was driving to work in Gander when he saw the plane go down on a scrub- and tree-lined hillside about 400 yards from the end of the runway.

Made Slow Descent

“I saw the plane kind of make a slow descent and disappear among some trees, and a mushroom of flame shot right in the air,” he said. “Actually there was no noise at all, it was like watching a silent movie.”

On its plunge, the blue and white plane, loaded with nearly 50 tons of fuel, swooped close to the Trans-Canada Highway, skidded down a hill toward Gander Lake and broke apart.

The burning fuel left a trail of brush fires that continued to smolder hours after the crash.

The wreckage was strewn over a wide area, but the first rescue crews to reach the scene found no signs of life, only burned bodies and a tangle of mud, metal and military equipment.

Weather Not a Factor

Canadian aviation officials said that it was overcast at the time of the crash and a light snow had fallen earlier in the morning, but that weather did not appear to be a factor. The plane had made a previous fuel stop in Cologne, West Germany.

An official of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said there was nothing to indicate any act of terrorism. And a spokesman at the Defense Department in Washington said the Pentagon had no evidence of an explosion.

President Reagan said he was “shocked and saddened” by the disaster. A Pentagon team and U.S. civilian aviation experts were dispatched to the scene from Washington.

The soldiers, members of the 3rd Battalion, 502nd Infantry of the 101st Airborne Division, had just completed a six-month tour in the Sinai as part of the 2,600-man, 11-nation peacekeeping force assigned there to oversee the 1979 Camp David peace accords between Egypt and Israel.

The flight was the second of three chartered to take a total of 800 American military personnel home. The first arrived at Ft. Campbell on Dec. 5; the last is scheduled for Dec. 19.