60 Bodies Recovered From Site of Jet Crash

Search teams recovered debris and the first 60 bodies from the crash site of a Swissair jetliner just off the coast here Thursday as air safety officials began their investigation into why the plane plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 229 people on board.

Swissair Flight 111, bound from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to Geneva, crashed about seven miles out from this tiny fishing village on the Nova Scotia coast late Wednesday as the pilot struggled in a smoke-filled cockpit to bring the plane in for an emergency landing in Halifax. The dead consisted of 215 passengers and 14 crew members. Swissair officials said Thursday that 137 victims were Americans.

The dead included Dr. Jonathan Mann, 51, a pioneering AIDS researcher and first chief of the United Nations program to combat AIDS, and his wife, Dr. Mary Lou Clements-Mann, 51, also a well-known medical researcher.

At least six U.N. staff members or affiliated personnel also were among the fatalities, according to officials at U.N. headquarters in New York, where flags were lowered to half-staff Thursday.

Also among the dead were Tom and Julie Sperber of San Juan Capistrano. The couple, married just a year, were on a delayed honeymoon and were on their way to Greece, relatives said.

“We’re devastated,” Frank Sperber, Tom’s cousin, said Thursday night. “They were very fun-loving and very much in love. . . . It’s a tragedy.”

Tom Sperber, who was in his late 30s, supplied linens to hotel chains, neighbors and relatives said. Julie Sperber, in her early 30s, was a pharmaceutical representative. Relatives said the couple rode bikes, played tennis with friends and had recently bought and remodeled a home.

“They were both very athletic,” Frank Sperber said.

As authorities here recounted what is known so far about the last moments of Flight 111, a picture emerged of a spiraling emergency that relentlessly engulfed the crew’s efforts to save the plane, rather than an instantaneous catastrophe such as an unexpected midair explosion.

Pilot Urs Zimmermann, 50, had time to radio a distress call, receive permission for an emergency landing and dump excess fuel before losing control of the aircraft. The passengers also apparently were warned to prepare for the possibility of a water landing; some of the recovered bodies reportedly were wearing life jackets.

Further clues may begin to emerge today, when 18 divers are scheduled to arrive from a Canadian navy base in British Columbia, according to the Rescue Coordination Center in Halifax. One of their tasks will be to search out the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, the so-called black boxes that sometimes prove crucial in determining the cause of airplane crashes. A Canadian naval submarine and sonar devices dropped from aircraft also are expected to be used to search for large sections of the aircraft.

Canadian Teams Search for Wreckage

On Thursday, according to Lt. Cmdr. Jacques Fauteux, a spokesman for the Canadian navy, navy and coast guard searchers retrieved numerous small bits of wreckage and one large piece of the fuselage from the McDonnell Douglas MD-11 jet--built in Long Beach--but not the recorders.

As the day wore on, wind and waves gradually increased the size of the debris field, until by dusk it measured eight to nine miles square, Fauteux said.

The search, involving an estimated 1,200 military personnel, was expected to continue through the night. It remains officially designated as a search for survivors, but Fauteux acknowledged that none are expected to be found. That conclusion could become official as soon as today when control over the crash scene could pass from the military to the Canadian Transportation Safety Board, charged with finding the cause of the crash.

Authorities here and in Washington said it was too early to speculate on causes but stressed there is no evidence of sabotage.

“It’s much to soon to say with certainty what the sequence of events was before the accident,” said Benoit Bouchard, head of the Canadian safety board. “I can’t tell you today exactly what happened.”

In Washington, Atty. Gen. Janet Reno said there were no indications that the crash resulted from a terrorist attack.

“My understanding is that all initial information indicates that it was an accident,” Reno told reporters Thursday at her weekly news briefing.

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, or NTSB, sent a team of crash experts to Nova Scotia headed by Greg Feith, lead investigator of the 1996 ValuJet crash in the Florida Everglades.

One of the first tasks facing U.S. and Canadian safety investigators is to form working parties to examine all aspects of the accident, ranging from the condition of the engines and the integrity of the plane’s structure to the performance of its crew.

Canadian authorities said that, shortly after 10 p.m. local time Wednesday, the pilot of the aircraft radioed a distress call to air traffic controllers in Moncton, Canada. He reported smoke in the cockpit and requested an emergency landing in Boston. The controllers advised him that Halifax was closer. As is typical of emergency landings, the pilot dumped excess fuel over the ocean and was approaching Halifax International Airport when the aircraft disappeared from radar screens.

Pilot Was Agonizingly Close to His Goal

Philippe Bruggisser, chief executive of SAir Group, Swissair’s parent company, told reporters in Zurich that the pilot was agonizingly close to his goal.

“The crash followed around seven to 10 minutes of flying time out of the Halifax airport. Ten minutes more and the aircraft would have landed,” he said.

The crash shook walls in buildings of coastal communities, awakened residents and triggered an immediate and massive search. About a dozen private fishing boats joined coast guard vessels and two of the Canadian navy’s newest warships in the effort. Ship-mounted lights, spotlights from overflying helicopters and flares illuminated the area throughout the night and early morning, amid rising swells and increasingly heavy rain.

Although searchers started with high hopes--there were initial, false reports of survivors in the water--they were faced instead with horrifying examples of devastation: floating bodies and body parts, shoes, wallets, eyeglasses, purses, bits of luggage. A Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reporter who rode a boat into the debris field told of spotting a love letter with the phrase, “see you soon.”

Few of those who participated in the overnight search wanted to talk about it Thursday.

“It’s something I never thought I’d see in my life; it’s something I never, ever want to see again,” one unidentified fisherman told reporters.

As dawn broke, the volunteer fishing boats gradually went home, and the military presence increased. By evening, Fauteux said, seven navy ships, eight coast guard vessels and nine aircraft were deployed.

Meanwhile, some of the fishermen who had aided in the rescue attempt sat on the rocks and watched the body bags being unloaded onto the government-owned wharf here. The remains were transported to the nearby Shearwater military base, where a temporary morgue and a reception center for relatives of the dead were being set up.

Recovered wreckage also was being trucked from Peggy’s Cove to Shearwater, where it will be stored for investigators.

Local Residents Open Their Homes

The search effort and the hundreds of journalists from around the world who have descended here transformed Peggy’s Cove, which, as fishing has become less lucrative, has become more reliant on the tourists and photographers drawn by its red-and-white lighthouse standing on a rocky point.

Residents here, in nearby Halifax and surrounding communities were stunned by the events. But they also rallied; some offered to open their homes to families of the crash victims. The provincial government guaranteed hundreds of hotel rooms for those coming from the United States and Europe to identify the bodies.

President Clinton, traveling in Northern Ireland, issued a statement expressing sympathy to the families of the passengers and crew and offering full U.S. cooperation to Canadian authorities.

It was the worst air tragedy in Swiss history, and the European nation’s government declared an official day of mourning. The Swiss flag--a white cross on a red field, which is painted on the tail of Swissair jetliners--was lowered throughout the land.

Bruggisser of SAir Group said the airline would pay out $20,000 in immediate financial aid to victims’ families who request it. This was in addition to any compensation due under international law.

Some in shock, some crying, about 100 family members and friends who had arrived at Geneva’s Cointrin Airport to be reunited with loved ones were taken by airline personnel to a secluded location as calls went out for crisis counselors.

“This is a difficult day for us and for our country,” Foreign Minister Flavio Cotti, head of the Federal Council that serves as Switzerland’s national government, said Thursday.

The council called an emergency session to discuss the disaster. After the meeting, Cotti said the Swiss government also had no indication that terrorism might be a factor.

Southland Victims Reported in Crash

Monte Wilkins, 19, of Yucaipa, who was on his way to attend college in Switzerland, was among the casualties, according to a spokesman for the family.

Wilkins, the son of David and Janet Wilkins of Yucaipa, was en route to Switzerland to take a business course at Salede College in Geneva, according to Don Roth, who said he was acting as the family spokesman.

Monte Wilkins attended Walla Walla College in Washington last year and was a graduate of Mt. Elias Bozeman Academy in Montana.

In addition to his parents, he is survived by two sisters, Shawn, 29, and Marie, 21, and a brother, Darren, 27.

A recording at the family home late Thursday said family members would not take phone calls because they were dealing with the tragedy. Roth said some family members were en route to Canada late Thursday.

In New York, news of the crash brought many relatives and friends of Swissair passengers to Kennedy International Airport late Wednesday and into Thursday. The scene was grimly reminiscent of the crash two years ago of TWA Flight 800, which also plunged into the Atlantic, killing all 230 people aboard the Boeing 747 shortly after takeoff from New York.

The FBI added agents to its small field office at the airport as the process began of questioning anyone who had come in contact with Flight 111. The FBI was working closely with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Possible Sources of Smoke in Cabin

Swiss Transportation Minister Moritz Leuenberger said three possible sources existed for the smoke in the cabin that the pilot of the MD-11 had reported just before the crash: one of the plane’s three engines, a fire in the cargo hold or an electrical short-circuit.

Since the beginning of 1994, there have been 11 cases of smoke or unusual odors in the cockpits or cabins of U.S. operated MD-11s that forced the jets to make unscheduled landings, according to a Los Angeles Times examination of a Federal Aviation Administration database.

In most cases, oil-contaminated components linked to the jets’ air-cycling systems were replaced, and the planes were returned to service. There was one report of a spilled chemical in the cargo compartment causing the smoke.

Wednesday night’s crash was the first time there were fatalities in an MD-11 accident. On July 31, 1997, a Federal Express MD-11 cargo plane crashed at Newark International Airport in New Jersey, but no one was killed. That accident still is under investigation.

Turner reported from Peggy’s Cove, Goldman from New York. Times staff writers John-Thor Dahlburg in Paris, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in Washington, David Haldane in Orange County and Elizabeth Douglass, Richard O’Reilly and Nieson Himmel in Los Angeles also contributed, along with Lisa Meyer and Lynette Ferdinand in New York and Andrew Van Velzen in Toronto.