Crash Team to Study Airport Conditions

Investigators arrived on this Pacific island today intent on determining whether an out-of-service component of the airport electronic navigation system contributed to the crash of a Korean Air jumbo jet that killed at least 225 people.

Survivors of the crash, who numbered 29 by airline and hospital counts, said there was no fire on board and that little else seemed unusual before the Boeing 747, carrying 254 people, hit a jungle hillside Wednesday on approach to the airport runway.

The investigators, sent by the National Transportation Safety Board, also were intent on looking into any connection between the crash and the fact that the Guam airport tower was being operated by contract employees, not Federal Aviation Administration flight controllers.

As authorities focused on the cause of the tragedy, U.S. troops recovered charred bodies from the wreckage. Anguished relatives arrived from Seoul on another Korean Air jet and mourned their loved ones. The survivors and their families marveled at how fate had spared them.

A bus filled with the relatives stopped at a press center in clear view of the wreckage: three sections of fuselage and a blue-and-red tail at the end of half-mile furrows plowed by landing gear into the red and brown earth of a shallow valley on a lush, green ridge called Nimitz Hill.

Most of the family members stepped out of the bus and stared, expressionless, in stunned silence. Two women burst into tears. One of them sobbed, the other screamed.

She grabbed a cable on a guard rail and rocked back and forth, uttering guttural cries, until others led her away.

Gov. Carl T.C. Gutierrez stood nearby with Rika Matsua, 11, a Japanese girl whom he had rescued from the burning wreckage shortly after the crash. Gutierrez had been unable to reach the girl’s mother, and she died in the flames.

As Gutierrez put his arm around Rika’s father, who had arrived from Japan to take his daughter home, a tall, lean man from the bus walked over to them, put his arms around the governor’s neck and began to sob.

He asked to get closer to the wreckage.

Gutierrez tried to calm him.

The governor explained that the crash site had to be decontaminated and very carefully preserved for the investigators.

Four additional buses loaded with relatives drove past, slowly. None stopped. The family members inside pressed their faces against the windows.

Most looked stunned. A few were crying.

Data Recorders Arrive at Lab

In Washington, Pat Cariseo, an NTSB official, said that the cockpit-voice and flight-data recorders from Flight 801 had arrived at the NTSB laboratory “in excellent condition.” He said investigators “hope to get good data out of them.”

Federal officials, who requested anonymity, said that the glide slope signal from the Guam airport electronic navigation system, called an Instrument Landing System (ILS), was out of service for repairs at the time of the crash and had been out of operation for two weeks. It was not scheduled to go back into service until Sept. 12.

Pilots, who can use ILS glide slopes to approach airports on autopilot, were notified on July 7 that the glide slope at Guam would be down for maintenance. Such an occurrence is not uncommon.

This meant that Park Yong Chul, the pilot of Flight 801, had to control his descent manually. On the Guam approach, this would require using a system called DME, or Distance Measuring Equipment, near the airport. DME signals help pilots determine how far they are from the runway. Cariseo, the NTSB official, said he did not know whether the DME system at the Guam airport was working properly.

Along with DME, Park would have used charts to determine his proper altitude. In Guam, the DME transmitter is more than three miles from the airport, directly on the approach to Runway 6 Left. According to the approach chart, all aircraft should cross the transmitter more than 1,100 feet above it. But that is exactly where Flight 801 hit.

It was not known whether Park was in contact with the airport air traffic control tower. NTSB Chairman Jim Hall said his investigators would look into whether the out-of-service glide slope and the fact that controllers in the Guam tower were contract employees had any connection with the crash.

“That’s something that we’re certainly looking at,” Hall told the Associated Press, in response to questions about both matters.

The use of contract employees instead of FAA controllers in airport towers dates from 1982, as an outgrowth of the air traffic controllers’ strike during the Reagan administration, and was later expanded to cut costs.

Out of 684 towers nationwide, 125 at low-activity airports are staffed by privately employed controllers, Fraser Jones, an FAA spokesman, told the AP. He said the Guam airport handles 64,124 flights a year, within the typical contract-tower range of 50,000 to 100,000 flights.

But the AP said that Guam has the only contract tower that guides Boeing 747s and other large passenger planes.

Sorrowful Relatives Gather at Center

Throughout the day, growing numbers of sorrowful relatives gathered at an information center set up by Korean Air at the Pacific Star Hotel. Among the survivors, the airline said, were four Americans: Grace Chung, 11, of Marietta, Ga., and Hyun Seong Hong, Angela Shim and Jeannie Shim, whose ages were not available, all from Guam.

The airline had no information about Ben Hsu, 15, of Hacienda Heights, who was on Flight 801 with the 11-year-old Marietta girl, her mother, Gloria Chung, and two other Chung children, Linda, 17, and Timothy, 13. The fate of the older Chungs was not known. The family had stopped in Los Angeles on their way from Georgia to pick up Chu, who is Gloria Chung’s nephew, for a visit with grandparents on Guam.

Korea Air also had no information about three other Californians who were on the plane: Wendy Bunten, 37, and Sean Burke, 24, both of San Diego, and Tiffany Kang, 8, of Glendale, who was traveling with nine members of her family from South Korea.

Before the plane crashed, at least some aboard apparently did not realize anything was seriously amiss. Passengers had already been told to fasten their seat belts for landing.

“One of the men who survived told me he sensed it was a strange kind of landing,” said Im Tae Woong, a Korean doctor in Guam, who spoke with survivors at the U.S. Naval Hospital. “Then when he looked around, he was alone. Everything, everybody, was gone.”

One of the flight attendants said she “sensed something was wrong, so she ducked down in her seat,” Im added. “She had injuries from the safety belt.”

Another survivor, Hong Hyon Song, 25, said the crash caught passengers unaware. “Nobody suspected anything at all until the plane hit the ground too hard,” he said. “Then the people thought it was [just] an abnormal landing. Two or three seconds later, the chairs in front of me were coming toward me.

“That’s when I heard the screaming. It was like a scene from the movies. Everything was flying around and moving. People were screaming and shouting.

“I thought, ‘I may die now.’

“The image that flashed in front of my eyes was my children, my wife, my brothers and sisters.

“It was pitch dark.

“There was a hole above me, so I climbed out. A woman was holding my leg, saying, ‘Please help me! Please help me!’

“I pulled her out, and together we walked about 100 meters. She was badly burned, so I told her to take off her clothes and put mine on. She was burned all over, except for her face.

“About five minutes later, the inside of [part] of the plane was filled with red flame.”

After about an hour, Hong said, he approached the burning wreckage. “I heard a child about 4 or 5 years old screaming, but I couldn’t reach him because there was so much smoke and flame.

“Then there were explosions. I think he burned to death.”

Still another survivor, Shin Hyon, 40, remembered hearing flight attendants say that the plane was about to touch down. “We could see land below us, so there was no reason to suspect otherwise,” he said. “Everything seemed normal.

“Then suddenly there was a big impact, and I lost consciousness. Only when I was being evacuated to the hospital did I realize it was an accident.”

By late Wednesday afternoon, U.S. military personnel decided there was no hope for more survivors, and they suspended their search.

Some relatives of the victims said that hope had been abandoned too quickly.

“If this was an American plane,” demanded one relative, “would they have stopped rescue operations so soon?”

Contributing to this story were staff writers John Mitchell, Bart Everett and Richard E. Meyer in Los Angeles and researchers Chi Jung Nam in Guam and Edith Stanley in Atlanta.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Landing a 747, a Step at a Time

Air carriers typically use the Instrument Landing System to guide planes safely to the ground. This system consists of two components: a glide slope, which provides an electronic slanted highway to the runway; and a localizer, which provides directional guidance. When the glide slope is not operating, as was the case in Guam, the pilot must manage his descent using navigational charts and cockpit gauges.

Localizer: Moves right or left to show alignment with runway.

Glide slope: (Not working) Moves up and down to show pilot whether he is above or below glide slope.

Normal approach (would clear each slope point smoothly)

Distance (to remain at each altitude)

STAIRSTEPS: Under a localizer approach, a plane descends in a stair-step pattern. This requires the pilot to be at certain altitudes at various distances from the airport runway.

CRASH POINT: At point of crash, Korean Air pilot missed his slope point that required an altitude of 1,400 feet, which included an additional 256 feet of vertical clearance.

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Focus on Flight Recorders

The flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder were recovered from the crash scene on Guam and shipped for analysis to the National Transportation Safety Board in Washington. Readings in the flight data recorder will reveal the plane’s status until the moment it struck the ground.

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WHERE THEY ARE ON THE PLANE

* Data acquisition system

* Flight and voice recorders

Researched by BART EVERETT / Los Angeles Times