Reward Offer Fails to Spark Gold Rush of Engine-Part Searchers on Iowa Farms

ALTA, Iowa — Despite rewards totaling $279,000, farmers in northwestern Iowa are not rushing to look for missing bits and pieces of the DC-10 jet engine that blew apart on United’s Flight 232 last month.

The parts, considered critical to an investigation of the incident, are believed scattered over a 16-square-mile area dense with ripening corn and soybeans north of this little agricultural community.

The National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the engine failure that led to the plane’s July 19 crash in Sioux City, about 60 miles west of here, said that without the parts “it will be difficult” to determine why the engine came apart.

General Electric, maker of the engine, last week offered farmers living in the search area up to $50,000 for turning in one missing part and lesser amounts for other parts, hoping to speed their recovery.

“The investigation is going on now, and we’d like to have the parts as soon as possible,” said Dave Lane, a spokesman for General Electric Aircraft Engines in Evandale, Ohio.

‘Every Possible Piece’

“We want to get every possible piece of that plane that we can,” NTSB spokesman Alan Pollack said.

“Search?” Buena Vista County Sheriff Chuck Eddy asked. “There isn’t much of a search.” Eddy, who is collecting parts as they are recovered, said that, in the first 10 days since the rewards were offered, he had received only “a couple of pieces.”

“We’ve been searching here and there,” said Steve Lullman, a worker at the Mellow Dent Seed farm in the search area. “But we don’t do it on company time. I think it’s a waste of time.”

“They’re looking in an area that’s bigger than downtown Los Angeles, and its covered with corn and beans,” said Mitch Quirin, research director for Mellow Dent. “That’s one heck of an area to be looking for nuts and bolts and pieces of metal the size of your forearm.”

Farmers and trappers familiar with the terrain believe recovery of parts is unlikely before the September harvest. Chances will also improve when hunting begins in the autumn and when trappers begin moving through groves, along creeks and in areas not under cultivation.

“I feel (that) when they start taking the crops out, calls will be a little more frequent,” Eddy said. “There are creeks and ponds and timber and abandoned farm places. They could have fallen in somebody’s grove with all their old machinery around.”

“How you gonna find anything in here?” asked Clarence Peterson, 84, leading a visitor into a field of corn.

The plants are up to 10 feet tall, and the foliage, dusty and abrasive, is so thick that little light filters into the narrow rows between plants.

“You could be walking down one row and there could be something in the next row and you wouldn’t see it,” said Peterson, whose family operates several farms in the search area.

Soybeans are also particularly dense in these final weeks of the growing season. They grow much lower to the ground than corn, and it is impossible to see the earth through the leaves.

General Electric offered rewards only to farmers on whose land the parts are found to prevent trespassing and to keep the area from being inundated by treasure hunters in search of a bounty.

Rewards range from $50,000 for a 300-pound, truck-tire-size titanium disc to $1,000 each for 20 nuts and 20 bolts to $500 for each of 57 missing fan blades.

Currently the rewards are available only to Aug. 31, but sources close to the investigation said they could be extended.

When asked if General Electric was disappointed by the relatively low level of response to the reward offer, company spokesman Lane said: “We understand many of those people are professional farmers and they have a lot of things on their minds this time of year. We certainly (would have) liked to have seen some results. That’s why we offered the reward.”