Crash Deaths Climb to 111; Tail Damage Still a Puzzle

The tail section of the shattered United Airlines DC-10 was moved into a hangar Monday so that investigators could try to reassemble it, and officials said the initial phase of the crash probe was nearing an end.

“Certainly by mid to late week we hope to have completed everything out at the airport,” Ted Lopatkiewicz of the National Transportation Safety Board said. Meanwhile, searchers were still looking for pieces of the jet’s rear engine, and the number of lives lost to the crash last Wednesday rose to 111 with the death of an injured passenger.

Brent Bealer, 27, of Quakertown, Pa., died Sunday night at St. Luke’s Regional Medical Center, Rhonda Ostrihonsky of the hospital staff said.

32 Still in Hospitals

The plane carried 296 people, of whom 185 have survived. Officials at St. Luke’s and Marian Health Center said that 32 of the survivors remained hospitalized.

United said that 108 bodies had been positively identified by Monday afternoon.

Joe Hopkins, speaking for United, said the airline on Monday provided a special flight to Chicago to carry 12 bodies, 29 relatives of the dead, one survivor and five United employees. On Sunday, a United flight carried 11 bodies, 33 family members and one survivor to Chicago.

United officials said that Capt. Alfred C. Haynes, the pilot of Flight 232, would be released from Marian Health Center today and would make a statement. Haynes, of Seattle, has been praised for keeping the plane aloft and guiding it to the airport after almost all means of controlling the jet had been lost.

Investigators used cranes to move the plane’s tail section into a hangar, where they tried to piece it back together to determine how much damage was done when the No. 2 engine broke up over the farms of northwestern Iowa.

Farm Fields Combed

Other teams continued searching a 16-square-mile section of corn and soybean fields about 60 miles from the crash site, in hopes of finding missing pieces of the engine, Lopatkiewicz said. None had been found by Monday, he said.

Officials had jets from the Nebraska Air National Guard take infrared photographs of the area and asked that farmers watch for pieces of the engine in the fields.

Lopatkiewicz said it will “take about nine to 12 months” to determine what caused the jetliner’s tail engine to come apart and sever hydraulic lines.