Firefighting Planes Are Grounded After Crash

The U.S. Forest Service grounded all seven of its C-130 firefighting planes Tuesday after the wings snapped off one of the four-engine aircraft as it was battling a blaze in the High Sierra.

All three crewmen aboard the 45-year-old air tanker were killed Monday when it slammed in flames into a field near Walker, Calif., about 25 miles north of Yosemite National Park.

They were identified Tuesday as pilot Steven Wass, 42, of Gardnerville, Nev.; co-pilot Craig Labare, 36, of Loomis, Calif.; and crewman Michael Davis, 59, of Bakersfield.

A National Transportation Safety Board team based in Los Angeles flew to the crash site Tuesday to determine how the accident occurred.

Videotape filmed by an amateur shows that the wings snapped upward simultaneously as the plane descended in what appeared to be a normal, shallow dive after dumping fire retardant.

Flames are visible as the wings come off, but it is not clear whether the fire on the plane started before the wings came off or at the moment of separation.

Because of the loads they carry, wings are usually the strongest structures in a plane, and veteran aviators said wing failures are rare.

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” said Barry Schiff, a retired TWA pilot and aviation safety consultant.

“It was shocking,” said Rep. Jim Gibbons, a Nevada Republican and former Air Force pilot who spent about 1,000 hours behind the controls of C-130s during the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars. “Before you let other planes that are models like that one fly again, you want to inspect them.”

More than 2,000 C-130s have been built by Lockheed since 1954. The bottle-nosed turboprop transport planes earned a reputation for rugged dependability in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf.

Nicknamed the Hercules, the plane has become a mainstay in the nation’s aerial firefighting fleet, and five of the seven under contract with the Forest Service were being used when the accident occurred.

The aircraft that crashed was being leased from Hawkins and Powers Aviation Inc. in Greybull, Wyo.

“They are tough machines,” Schiff said. “But they fly in tooth-shattering turbulence, and they take a hell of a beating. Over the long haul, you could have failure due to metal fatigue. If the center wing box failed, it’s certainly possible that both the wings could come off.”

Schiff said the videotape did not seem to show that the plane was going through any unusually stressful maneuvers when the wings snapped off. “But if it was ready to go, it was ready to go,” he said.

The plane had undergone repairs to fix wing cracks in 1998, a representative for the plane’s owner said Tuesday. But whether such surface flaws might have led to major structural failure is unknown.

The plane was built in 1957 and delivered to the Air Force that year. It was a C-130A, one of the first in a series of production models than ran all the way through the C-130H.

While most were used as transports, some were converted for specialized missions that included refueling rescue helicopters, jamming enemy electronics systems and serving as aerial gun platforms.

Because of their durability, some of the planes have been used for meteorological studies while flying through full-strength hurricanes.

The 10,000-acre fire that the C-130A was battling erupted Saturday in Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, an area used by Marines for survival training. Fire officials said the blaze was human-caused, but declined to give further details.

One home, a garage and a trailer burned, but winds had shifted by Tuesday, and most of the evacuees were able to return to their homes.

By Tuesday night, the wildfire was burning away from occupied areas. Officials said they hoped to contain the blaze by early next week.

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The Associated Press contributed to this report.