Experts Use Lasers to Probe Utah Crash

Federal safety experts, using state-of-the-art laser equipment, began a painstaking survey of a suburban crash site Friday as the initial step in a months-long investigation of the collision of two airplanes Thursday that claimed the lives of 10, two of them Southern Californians and two of them Indian children.

It was the first time that the laser transit system--which enables investigators to pinpoint the exact position in which each piece of wreckage and human remains fell--has been used in a National Transportation Safety Board investigation, according to John Lauber, the NTSB member heading the inquiry.

Lauber said the survey should prove helpful in determining how and why the SkyWest airliner and the small private plane collided at about 1 p.m. Thursday as the commuter plane was making its final approach for a landing at Salt Lake City International Airport.

Three-Square-Mile Area

The collision sent debris and dismembered bodies raining over a three-square-mile area of Kearns, a working-class community of single-family homes in the frozen, wind-swept flatlands about 12 miles southwest of downtown Salt Lake City.

The pilot, co-pilot and six passengers aboard the twin-engine turbo-prop commuter plane and the instructor and pilot aboard the single-engine Mooney M-20 were all killed in the accident, but there were no casualties or injuries on the ground.

The two Southern Californians aboard the commuter plane were identified as Tom Rouse, 32, of Beverly Hills, corporate secretary of Jack Rouse & Son, his family’s Los Angeles auctioneering firm, and Stephen Copans of Woodland Hills, described as in his 40s. Rouse was traveling in Idaho and Utah on business, a company spokeswoman said.

Two Children Killed

Three of the other victims were two children on their way to live with their grandmother on a South Dakota Indian reservation and a woman court officer flying with them. The children were identified as Nekoma Rengel, 6, and Jimmy Landreaux, 5, from the southeastern Idaho town of Blackfoot, traveling to South Dakota with Laverne Tiger, of Wakpala, S.D., who worked for the tribal court.

Other victims aboard the SkyWest flight were identified as Capt. Michael D. Gambill, 37, of Helena, Mont., and his first officer, Walter F. Ray Jr., 33, of Chubbuck, Ida., and another passenger, Chuck Montgomery of Woodinville, Wash.

Those aboard the small plane were identified as flight instructor Paul Lietz, 53, of Salt Lake County, and pilot Chester Baker, 38, of Sandy, Utah.

Lauber stressed that it was still far too early to make any determination about why the accident occurred, but earlier comments by Gregory Feith, an air safety investigator from the NTSB’s Denver field office, focused attention on the smaller plane’s intrusion into the Airport Radar Service Area (ARSA) surrounding Salt Lake City International.

Reserved Air Space

“We want to know if he was flying in the air space where he should not have been,” Feith said.

Feith told reporters on Thursday night that the collision took place well within the perimeters of the ARSA. ARSA air space normally is reserved for aircraft taking off or landing at the International Airport. There was no indication Friday that the small plane had done--or planned to do--either.

Officials at the airport said Federal Aviation Administration rules require planes operating within the ARSA to maintain radio communication with controllers at the Salt Lake City Terminal Radar Approach Control facility at the airport.

The SkyWest plane, which was en route to Salt Lake City from Pocatello, Ida., had established radio contact, according to the officials. But they said the smaller plane, which had taken off a few moments earlier from Airport Number 2, a small airfield about 10 miles south of the International Airport, had not.

Recorded Radar Data

Although officials had said earlier that the small plane never appeared on controllers’ screens, Lauber said late Friday that recorded radar data showed that a “target” of an aircraft not under control of controllers did enter the ARSA at about the same time that the commuter plane turned for its final approach.

He said the targets appeared to converge on the screen before both disappeared. While he could not say that the small plane was definitely the Mooney, he said radar data was “consistent” with eyewitness reports of how the two planes converged and collided.

Three witnesses “who actually saw the collision,” he said, were in “general agreement” on what happened. As Lauber reconstructed it, the planes were traveling in roughly the same direction and converged at approximately a 45-degree angle, with the left wing tip of the Mooney striking the commuter plane’s right wing tip.

Report After Collision

Initial reports indicated that a single expletive was heard over the SkyWest plane’s radio a moment after the collision.

In the seconds that followed, the shattered remnants of the two planes and their human cargo plummeted earthward, spattering the snow-whitened community below with macabre swatches of color.

Adults did what they could to shield the young from the grim spectacle. Parents herded their children indoors. Teachers at St. Francis Xavier Church School, where portions of at least one body fell, sent their pupils home early.

The church’s pastor, Father Louis Fletcher, braved gusting winds and subfreezing temperatures that drove the wind chill factor down to 30 below, attending to those who had died.

In ‘Hands of God’

“When I found something identifiable, I committed it to the hands of God,” he said. “That’s about as much as I could do.”

There were scores of others--people schooled in Utah’s renowned Mormon tradition of helping out when help is needed--men and women who did what they could to attend to the living.

There were more than 300 state and local police and fire personnel who stuck it out through the cruelly cold night, searching for human remains until darkness forced a halt and then standing guard until dawn to seal off the area and protect homes that had been vacated because of power lines downed by the crash.

There were men from the power company and women from the Red Cross, doing what they could to fix what was broken and comfort those who were troubled.

And there were the dozens of unpaid volunteers--local businessmen, restaurant owners and housewives--who contributed warm food and hot coffee for those who were doing the work.

Search Resumes

At dawn Friday, the search resumed for human remains, and by noon it appeared that the last of them had been found and removed to the pathology laboratory at the University of Utah Medical Center here.

NTSB teams, their planning sessions completed, began fanning out through the impact area Friday afternoon, using the laser equipment to survey the same scenes recorded earlier by Salt Lake County sheriff’s deputies using video cameras. Lauber and several others examined the area from a helicopter.

Neither plane was of a kind required by the FAA to carry a flight data recorder, the so-called black box that is often of assistance to crash investigators.

While much of the smaller debris was hauled away in pickup trucks for cataloguing, storage, and later inspection, Lauber said some of the larger chunks--like the 12-foot section of the commuter plane’s fuselage in the middle of a street near the church--would remain in place, possibly for several days, until the survey is complete.

NTSB officials said the field investigation here would probably take about a week, with teams of specialists assigned variously to such tasks as interviewing witnesses, studying the wreckage for possible pre-crash structural flaws and engine failures, reviewing the operations of the air traffic controllers, examining the documented history of the plane crews and their aircraft and studying the weather at the time of the crash.

Once the gathering of evidence here is complete, the NTSB personnel will return to their home base in Washington to re-examine what they have found.

A public hearing at which interested parties may testify will be scheduled here, probably in two to three months.

The NTSB’s determination of the cause of the accident can be expected sometime within the year.