Curbs on NATO Flights Urged : Seal Beach Man Piloted Jet in W. German Crash

The fiery crash of a U.S. warplane piloted by an Air Force officer from Seal Beach has set off demands from West Germans that NATO flights over this densely populated country be curbed to halt the “terrible” death toll from such accidents.

So far 100 people have been killed this year.

Five people were killed Thursday, including the Air Force pilot, identified as Michael P. Foster, 34. Fifty other people were injured. His A-10 Thunderbolt II crashed into homes in the city of Remscheid, destroying two dozen of them.

Air Force officials said Foster is survived by his wife and two sons. He was assigned to the 81st Tactical Fighter Wing.

The United States and several other NATO nations temporarily suspended training flights, but there were calls for permanent reductions.

The governor of the state in West Germany where the plane crashed said he will take the issue to the federal Parliament. Another governor called on Chancellor Helmut Kohl to negotiate with NATO allies.

On any given day in West Germany, the sky is filled with the screechings and rumbles of hundreds of jets and helicopters. Opposition to the flights has increased with the recent tragedies.

Before Thursday’s fatal crash, 12 major accidents of military aircraft had killed 95 people this year alone. They included 70 who died from an air show crash in Ramstein in August.

The opposition took on added urgency after the A-10 plowed into Remscheid, a city of 130,000 about 15 miles east of Dusseldorf.

The exact cause of the crash is under investigation, but West German air force Gen. Horst Jungkurth said the pilot “may have become disoriented when he tried to climb in heavy cloud cover” to get out of bad weather.

U.S. Ambassador Richard Burt and West German Defense Minister Rupert Scholz visited the site Friday. Burt denied that the flight was a low-level mission, saying the A-10 was flying between 2,500 and 3,300 feet before it began to descend.

In West German military parlance, low-level flights range from 250 to 500 feet above the ground and are restricted to seven rural areas in the country. But the number of overall training accidents in recent years has aroused widespread concern in a country of 61 million people that is smaller than Texas.

Oskar Lafontaine, the popular, leftist governor of Saarland state, called on Kohl, a conservative Christian Democrat, to start to work “immediately” for a ban on low-level training flights and mock air battles over inhabited areas.

Johannes Rau, the Social Democratic governor of North Rhine-Westphalia state where the accident occurred, said he will go to Parliament to seek a ban of low-level flights over densely populated areas.