U.S. Troop Plane Crash Kills 258 : DC-8 Burns in Canada; GIs Were Returning Home From Sinai Duty

A chartered jetliner carrying American peacekeeping troops home from the Middle East for Christmas crashed and burned on takeoff here Thursday, killing all 250 soldiers and eight crew members aboard.

The DC-8 aircraft, operated by the Miami-based charter company Arrow Air, was taking the military personnel to Ft. Campbell, Ky., when it crashed in a wooded area shortly after takeoff from Gander International Airport in eastern Newfoundland.

The soldiers, 247 men and three women from the 3rd Battalion, 502nd Infantry, 101st Airborne Division, were returning to Ft. Campbell, their headquarters, from a six-month tour of duty in the Sinai Peninsula. All were members of the Multinational Force and Observers, a 2,600-member, 11-nation team assigned to monitor compliance with the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement.

Names Being Withheld

In Washington, a Pentagon official said the names of the dead will not be released until they have been positively identified.

At Ft. Campbell, the families and friends of the soldiers learned of the disaster as they assembled for a brass-band welcome that had long been planned. All the flags on the post were immediately lowered to half-staff.

“There was grief, there was concern,” said the post spokesman, Maj. James Gleisberg, adding that the families keeping vigil “didn’t know if their husbands, or fathers or loved ones were actually on board.”

The plane had stopped briefly at Gander to refuel and was carrying 50 tons of jet fuel when it took off. Eyewitnesses said it rushed down the runway, skimmed across the Trans-Canada Highway and crashed near the shore of Gander Lake, spilling weapons and Christmas presents across a broad swath of snow-covered woods. Burning fuel left a trail of brush fires that smoldered hours after the crash.

Canadian Transport Minister Donald Mazankowski said, “The plane got airborne, probably didn’t reach a thousand feet . . . and crashed.”

“Where it came down, it obviously exploded on impact,” Canadian Transport Department spokesman Bruce Reid said after returning to the airport following a helicopter tour of the site. “Everything in the area is charred. We have no indication it exploded in the air.”

Keith Head, an Avis car rental agent, said he had just pulled up to the terminal at 6:45 a.m. local time (2:15 a.m. PST) when he saw the blue-and-white plane move down the 10,000-foot runway. “Then I saw the sky all light up and then a huge explosion and then a mushroom-like cloud, exactly like a mushroom cloud,” he said.

Eyewitnesses agreed there was nothing out of the ordinary about the takeoff. “I didn’t hear anything,” said Judy Parson, another car rental agent at the airport. “But suddenly I just saw a glare in the sky. There was a flash, like a sunburst. It lasted for a few seconds and then I heard an explosion.”

Recorders Recovered

The cockpit voice and flight data recorders, which could provide crucial information about the last seconds of the ill-fated flight, were recovered from the wreckage and sent to Ottawa for analysis today at the National Research Council.

Peter Boag, the investigator in charge of the crash for the Canada Aviation Safety Board, said the recorders were damaged by fire, “but the exact amounts and the consequences of that fire I’m not aware of at this time.” He declined all comment on the cause of the crash.

Head and others who rushed to the site within minutes of the crash said there was no sign of survivors. The bodies of the victims and debris were scattered for hundreds of yards along the plane’s path. “Some of the bodies had been blown out of their uniforms,” Head said.

Thursday night, Arrow Air released the names of the DC-8’s crew: Capt. John Griffin; First Officer John Robert Conley; Flight Engineer Mike Fowler; Maia Matasovski, flight service manager, and flight attendants Jean Serafin, Desiree McKay, Ruthie Phillips and Stacey Cutler. The three cockpit crew members were based in Miami; the others in the New York area.

Clipped Tops of Trees

The plane had barely cleared the runway when it clipped the tops of trees just south of the runway, according to Staff Sgt. H. Johnston of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He said it crashed “a quarter to half a mile south” of the airport, toward Gander Lake. “It had gone over the Trans-Canada (highway) and down into a wooded area . . . just off a small hill.”

The plane, a stretched version of the DC-8, left Cairo on Wednesday and stopped to refuel in Cologne, West Germany, then stopped here, and was on the last leg of its flight to Ft. Campbell.

Although reporters pressed Boag on the cause of the crash and raised the possibility of a terrorist bomb or other sabotage, the investigator refused comment. Johnston told newsmen that “there is nothing to indicate any act of terrorism.”

Johnston also seemed to rule out weather as a factor in the crash. “There was . . . a drizzle,” he said in an interview, “a combination of fog, snow and freezing rain, but nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, another aircraft had just taken off with no trouble.”

Refueling for Soviets

The airport in this Newfoundland town of 12,000 is used by charter aircraft as well as by Soviet, Cuban and East European airlines as a refueling stop for long flights between North America and Western Europe and the Middle East. Before the advent of jet travel, Gander was a far busier place, a major refueling stop for scheduled flights between North America and Europe.

The crash site was closed to the press, but some rescue workers said the plane had burned to its undercarriage.

“There were flames and the smell of burning rubber. Most of the bodies were burned,” said one rescue worker who asked not to be identified.

Medical teams were brought in to collect the bodies of the victims. Late in the afternoon, the remains were taken to a temporary morgue at the airport for transfer today to Dover Air Force Base, Del., where military forensic experts will identify the victims.

U.S. Teams Sent

A representative of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and others from the Federal Aviation Administration were dispatched to Gander, along with an Army team headed by Maj. Gen. John S. Crosby, assistant deputy chief of staff for personnel. But Pentagon officials said that Canadian authorities are responsible for the investigation of the crash.

“We will do whatever the Canadians wish, and I’m sure we’ll be kept informed on it,” Pentagon spokesman Robert B. Sims said.

Sims said the Defense Department has no indication of the cause of the crash. “We have nothing to indicate that there was an explosion before the crash, or to indicate that there was hostile action of any kind,” he said.

In Cairo, where the 250 troops boarded, the airplane and the soldiers’ baggage were inspected by U.S. military police, the Pentagon spokesman said. The refueling in Cologne was carried out by civilians, and no one boarded the plane there, with the exception of a new crew, relieving the crew that had flown the plane to West Germany, the spokesman added.

Security at Cairo

Sims, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, said he was “sure there was security at the site” in Cairo. Pentagon officials were uncertain where the aircraft had been before it picked up the soldiers in Egypt.

In Washington, President Reagan said in a statement that he and Mrs. Reagan were “deeply shocked and saddened” by the crash.

“The loss, tragic at any time, is especially painful at this holiday period. Our hearts go out to the loved ones of these brave soldiers who have paid the fullest price in the service of their country and the cause of peace,” he said.

In a letter to Maj. Gen. Burton D. Patrick, the division’s commanding general, Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger wrote: “It is such a shock to have these young lives snatched from us--young soldiers who were serving nobly and selflessly in the quest for peace and freedom around the world. With only peace in their hearts, they served with a dedication to country of which all of us are very proud.”

Of the 2,600 observers contributed to the Sinai force by Australia, Colombia, Fiji, France, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Britain, Norway, Uruguay and the United States, nearly half are deployed by the United States. Norway supplies the commander. The Ft. Campbell contingent had been deployed in July.

The independent organization is supported financially by contributions from the United States, Israel and Egypt.

Lookouts and Monitors

The troops man lookout posts and monitor traffic across the desert and mountains of the inhospitable Sinai Peninsula, to determine whether Israel or Egypt might be violating the 1979 peace agreement that returned the Sinai to Egyptian control after the Middle East wars of 1967 and 1973.

A spokesman for Arrow Air, the charter company, said the eight crew members were civilians.

Arrow, which conducts about $33.6 million worth of charter business with the Defense Department annually, was cited by the Federal Aviation Administration last year for a number of “deficiencies” associated with its rapid expansion. But Thursday’s fiery accident was the first fatal crash for the four-year-old airline.

95% in Charter Flights

Pentagon officials estimated that 95% of U.S. military personnel are carried by commercial charter airliners, rather than by the Military Airlift Command or in other government airplanes. Charters are favored, Sims said, “for reasons of economy.”

Even before the crash here, 1985 had already been the deadliest year in the history of commercial aviation. Thursday’s crash brought the total of airliner fatalities worldwide to 1,948, according to the International Civil Aviation Organization in Montreal.

The crash also appeared to be the worst air disaster affecting the military “in peace or war,” Pentagon spokesman Sims said.

On April 4, 1975, a U.S. Air Force Galaxy C-5 crashed near Saigon after takeoff with a load of Vietnamese orphans bound for new homes in the United States and killed 172 people.

Sims said the Pentagon will be “looking into” Arrow Airlines’ record and operations, but he declined to elaborate.

Times staff writers James Gerstenzang and Ralph Vartabedian in Washington also contributed to this story.