‘At Least 3 or 4’ Factors Blamed for Crash That Killed Ron Brown

The April 3 air crash in Croatia that killed Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown and 34 others resulted from a variety of factors rather than any one cause, Defense Secretary William J. Perry said Thursday.

“There is no single thing you can point to and say, ‘Aha, that’s what caused it,’ ” Perry told reporters. “There are at least three or four issues which combined” to cause the crash, including possible pilot error, he said.

In the absence of any one of them, Perry suggested, the accident might not have occurred.

Perry made his remarks as the Pentagon prepared to make public today portions of a massive report on the accident compiled by an Air Force investigating team. Air Force officials briefed President Clinton on the document Thursday.

The report comes a week after top Air Force officials relieved a one-star general and two colonels for failure to check out the Dubrovnik airport, where the plane was to land. The officers were in charge of the air wing responsible for transporting Brown and his party through Central Europe.

Perry declined to say Thursday whether others involved in the operation would be fired or reprimanded.

He made his comments to reporters traveling aboard his plane on a flight to Washington. The Defense Department declined to release a transcript of the remarks, saying that Perry had intended them only as a casual overview and had not been fully briefed on the Air Force investigation at the time.

Wire service reporters traveling with Perry reported that he listed a variety of factors that likely contributed to the crash, from bad weather and possible pilot error to inadequate navigational aids at the war-torn airport and failures of electronic equipment there.

Perry suggested that at least part of the blame would be placed on possible misjudgments by the aircraft’s pilot and co-pilot, neither of whom had ever landed at Dubrovnik. The plane, a CT-43A, is a military version of the Boeing 737.

“The question to which we don’t know the answer is, what assessment the pilots made,” he said. “Given the unsophisticated navigation [aids at the Dubrovnik airport], given the bad weather, why go in at all?”

The Brown aircraft contained government officials and business executives who were flying to Bosnia-Herzegovina in an effort to drum up more U.S. investment to help bolster an economic recovery in that war-ravaged country.