Smoldering Plane Yields No Survivors, No ‘Black Box’ : Tower crash: The investigators must work without clues from a flight recorder. A widow waits in the fog as the bodies of 23 are recovered.

Elaine Gwin waited solemnly Saturday morning in the thick, piney woods of southeast Georgia, trying to learn more about the commuter plane crash that killed her husband, Thomas, along with former U.S. Sen. John Tower and 21 others.

Although authorities did not release the passengers’ names until Saturday afternoon, Gwin was certain her husband, a marketing vice president for a local industrial supply company, had been on the plane returning from a business trip to Houston.

“He made that flight almost every week,” she said. “He was beginning to get tired of so much traveling and was going to stop in another year or two.”

Thomas Gwin was among 20 passengers and three flight crew members aboard Atlantic Southeast Airlines Flight 2311, which crashed and burned Friday about two miles short of the runway at Glynco Jetport, destination of the 30-minute flight from Atlanta. There were no survivors.

The passengers also included Tower’s daughter, Marian, astronaut Manley (Sonny) Carter Jr. and Dr. Nicholas Davies, an Atlanta cardiologist.

The cause of the crash remained unclear. Some witnesses reported hearing a “boom” just before the plane, a Brazilian-made Ebraer Brasilia 120, plunged nose-down into the trees and exploded in flames.

An official with the National Transportation Safety Board, which sent a team of specialists to the crash site, said Saturday that the investigation is made more difficult because the plane had no “black box” flight recorder. Commercial jetliners are required to carry the devices, but commuter airplanes are not.

Susan Coughlin, vice chairwoman of the safety board, predicted, however, that the agency would eventually determine what caused the crash. She said the board often successfully investigates crashes of aircraft that do not have black boxes.

Elaine Gwin is social services manager at the Glynn-Brunswick hospital. She said she learned of the crash Friday afternoon when the hospital staff was alerted that a plane had gone down on approach to the airport and that medical help might be needed.

Later, they were told there were no survivors.

She was waiting near the crash site at about 9 a.m. Saturday, even though authorities had told her that they would not let her in. “I want to go back,” she said. “I want to see it for myself.”

At midmorning the crash site was obscured by swirling fog and swarming gnats, and had been cordoned off by Glynn County and state police. The wreckage was still smoldering. Workers spent several hours removing the bodies, including those of two children.

The woods where the plane crashed are choked with undergrowth. A few local roads, mostly unpaved, lead to small crossroads communities of mobile homes and squat, one-story dwellings. A county landfill is nearby; discarded mattresses, rusty box springs and other trash litter the roadside.

Local reporters who managed to get near the site before it was sealed off said the plane was almost destroyed on impact.

“Very few trees were knocked down in that area,” Coughlin of the safety board said, “so you might infer that it came down at a steep angle.”

Tower’s presence on the plane was one of the first facts to emerge from the confusion of the crash. His trip had been planned as a highly visible promotion of a recently published book in which he defended his career and lashed back at political opponents who denied him Senate confirmation as defense secretary in the first year of the Bush Administration.

“Consequences: A Personal and Political Memoir,” was to be featured at a book party at Sea Island, a resort community on the outskirts of Brunswick. The 65-year-old Texas Republican had lined up newspaper, radio and television interviews in the area. A press reception had been planned for Saturday evening.

“I was supposed to have an interview with him at 4:30 yesterday,” said Eric Cravey, a reporter with radio station WGIG in Brunswick. “Then we heard the plane went down. His office said: ‘Just pray he didn’t make the flight.’ ”

John Beiser, a senior vice president of Atlantic Southeast, told reporters the pilot of the twin-engine plane had been in radio contact with the control tower in preparation for landing and had reported no difficulty.

Eyewitness reports were sketchy and somewhat contradictory in the hours just after the crash. Preston Hicks, a safety board official who arrived from Washington late Friday, said witnesses described hearing a “loud bang” just before “the aircraft nosed over into the ground.”

Other witnesses interviewed by local reporters said the plane became enveloped in thick smoke, then veered off, as though it were flipping over.