Survival of 2 in plane crash is called a miracle
Published: October 21, 2004
Rescuers who rushed to a flaming stand of trees along a muddy soybean field here could not save 13 people trapped in and around a shredded commuter plane - but found two passengers who almost inexplicably managed to save themselves.
One walked unsteadily up to the first responders and said she had been in a plane crash. The other, suffering serious fractures, lay screaming for help after dragging himself clear of the inferno Tuesday night.
The destruction was so complete that it took well into Wednesday for investigators to announce that the site contained all 13 others aboard, not just the eight bodies counted at first.
AmericanConnection Flight 5966 from Lambert Field crashed about two miles south of the runway at Kirksville Regional Airport about 7:45 p.m. Tuesday in mist and fog. The cloud ceiling was only about 300 feet - near the minimum visibility for the airport, according to aviation experts.
The two-engine turboprop aircraft sliced into the mature trees on a descending angle before smashing into the ground and catching fire. One of the wings remained in a tree about 100 feet from the main crash site.
Rescue workers originally reported eight fatalities and ended their search for five missing people because of darkness, thick underbrush and crash debris. Late Wednesday afternoon, Carol Carmody, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, confirmed that both pilots and the other 11 passengers had died.
“We have removed all the victims, and there are only two survivors,” Carmody said.
Most of the flight’s 13 passengers were doctors and medical staff workers heading to a conference at the Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine. Among them were two doctors affiliated with the Arnold P. Gold Foundation of Englewood Cliffs, N.J., which was to have hosted the seminar to promote compassionate care in medicine.
The two survivors were listed in fair condition at Northeast Missouri Regional Medical Center, next door to the medical school. John Krogh, 69, of Utah, suffered a broken hip and back. Wendy Bonham, 44, Krogh’s assistant, suffered a broken right arm and mild to severe burns over 8 percent of her body.
Relatives said they were told the two were seated across the aisle from each other in the “exit row” over the wing, and were able to escape through emergency hatches as the wreckage caught fire. Krogh had to crawl because of his back injury.
Krogh used to teach anatomy at the college, and some of the hospital staff who treated him were among his former students.
One of them, Dr. Charles Zeman, director of trauma services at Northeast Regional, said emergency room personnel did not recognize Krogh until they cleaned off the blood. Zeman said they were amazed that Krogh and Bonham survived.
“We see car accidents with worse injuries coming here every week,” Zeman said. “This is truly a miracle.”
The Adair County sheriff’s office dispatched officers at 7:55 p.m., after getting a telephone report of a plane down. Al Maglio, a photographer in Kirksville who arrived at the scene with the first officers, said he could hear a man screaming. Maglio said the woman walked toward them.
Considering the burning wreckage, Maglio said, he at first didn’t believe she could have walked away. He said his first thought was: “Who is this woman and where did she come from? (The plane) was a giant ball of flames. There were bodies all over the place.”
Corporate Airlines, of Smyrna, Tenn., operated the flight for American Airlines’ commuter system, known as AmericanConnection. The aircraft was a British Aerospace Jetstream 32, a workhorse of the commuter service in and out of Lambert to cities such as Kirksville.
Kirksville, in northeast Missouri, is about 160 miles by air from St. Louis and about 210 miles by road. It is home to Truman State University. The airport is six miles south of town and just west of U.S. Highway 63.
Barbara McCarty, who lives about a half-mile from the crash site, said she and her husband heard some explosions.
“There were two pretty good booms and then some smaller ones,” McCarty said. “But we thought it was thunder. We didn’t think anything of it until my daughter called and said she heard on the (police) scanner that a plane went down.”
Kirksville College officials said some of the passengers were regional deans who oversee students in their third and fourth years of education at other locations. The medical school held a memorial service Wednesday afternoon in the same room in which the seminar was to have been held.
Noting that the seminar was to promote compassion in medical treatment, college president James McGovern said, “Ironic, isn’t it?”
Kristi Foster, a student from Kansas City, took part and later said, “It’s a pretty close-knit group here. It really felt like these were people we did know.”
Dr. Ian Levenson, an assistant dean for the college’s Colorado region, said he was to have been on the flight but canceled three weeks ago.
“I’m a little spooked right now,” he said. “This is really a tragedy not only from a human point of view, but this is a school that’s so dedicated to training doctors in a very unique and substantive way that it’s going to be very difficult to reproduce what these people do in programs around the country.”
The Kirksville airport does not have a staffed control tower. The two-member crew of Flight 5966 contacted the Federal Aviation Administration’s regional control tower at Kansas City at 7:27 p.m. when they were about 10 miles from the Kirksville runway and reported a normal approach. That was their last contact.
Because of the mist and low ceiling, the National Weather Service had recommended since Tuesday afternoon that pilots approach the airport using their navigational instruments. Carmody, of the safety board, said the Kirksville airport is equipped with electronic beacons that provide information for “nonprecision” approaches, meaning that pilots still must follow a formula for a proper descent and observe readings on their instruments during their approach - and then must be able to see the runway from a minimum altitude just before they land.
Lambert Field and other major airports have more-advanced equipment that electronically provides pilots with proper angles of descent during bad weather. In such a “precision” descent, airport data automatically tells a flight crew whether it is making a proper approach.
Paul Czysz, professor emeritus of aerospace engineering at St. Louis University’s Parks College, said the weather conditions at Kirksville on Tuesday night made for a complicated landing. He said the 300-foot ceiling reported by the Weather Service is roughly the minimum for attempting a landing at that airport.
If pilots don’t see the runway by then, he said, they are supposed to climb back up and try again. Czysz said accidents of this sort usually involve pilot error, either by getting lost in low clouds or by misreading instruments.
“There have been a ton of accidents in weather like this and at airports like this,” said Czysz. “That was pretty darned close to the minimum ceiling. . . . It sounds like they were far too low. When a pilot gets to the ceiling, if he doesn’t break out (to see the runway), he should abort.
“Lindbergh flew like that, pilots in World War II routinely made landings like this,” he said. “But it’s a skilled approach.”
Jim Lock of Millard, Mo., who owns the woods and adjoining soybean field, said that when planes fly over the field on their approaches, “I sometimes think I can reach up and touch them.”
A spokesman for Corporate Airlines declined to provide details about the experience levels of the two pilots.
Official said the plane’s “black box” recorders for cockpit conversations and flight data were recovered and will be examined.
Todd Curtis, an air safety expert in Seattle, said smaller aircraft are not inherently more likely to crash than the big jets, but often fly into more hazardous airports.
“It’s not the plane itself,” said Curtis, of AirSafe.com. “It’s where the planes are flying, airports where you do not have the background support you have at the larger airports.”
Curtis holds a doctorate in aviation risk management and wrote a book, “Understanding Aviation Safety Data.” Curtis also worked for nine years as a safety analyst for Boeing Co.
The crash Tuesday night was the second involving a commuter plane in Missouri in less than a week. On Oct. 14, two pilots were killed when their otherwise-empty 50-seat Bombardier CL600-2B19, operated by Pinnacle Airlines, suffered failure of both jet engines and crashed on an emergency approach to the airport at Jefferson City.
The most recent commercial crash to kill passengers in the United States also involved a relatively small plane, Curtis said. All 19 passengers and both pilots were killed Jan. 8 last year when a prop-driven U.S. Airways Express aircraft crashed in Charlotte, N.C.
The accident Tuesday night occurred about 10 miles north of the site of the crash of a TWA DC-2 on the night of May 6, 1935, in similar weather. That accident, which killed a U.S. senator and four other passengers, led to a great expansion of federal regulation over commercial aviation.
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