6A
Friday, April 5, 1996
NATION/WORLD UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Lack of flight recorder hinders plane crash inquiry
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Air Force One and other military VIP aircraft carry "black box" flight data recorders. But for reasons the Air Force is unable to answer clearly, the plane that carried Commerce Secretary Ron Brown to his death did not.
The data recorders would not have kept the airplane in the sky, but they might have provided a clue as to why Brown's plane strayed almost two miles off course before crashing into a Croatian hillside near Dubrovnik.
The omission will hamper an investigation that began in stormy weather yesterday.
"We have done everything humanly possible on the military
side to ascertain whether this aircraft had flight data recorders or voice recorders on board and the answer we get ... is that it was not equipped with either," said Air Force
Ron Brown
Gen. Howell Estes III, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Master Sgt. Rick Corral of the 89th Air Wing at Andrews Air Force Base, the unit responsible for Washington-based government VIP travel including the president's Air
Force One, said all the passenger planes at the base have voice and data recorders.
The Federal Aviation Administration requires all but the smallest commercial passenger planes to carry flight recorder equipment. But the FAA has no jurisdiction over the military.
Military investigators who arrived in Dubrovnik yesterday have some evidence to go on. Officials have impounded a voice recording taken in the airport tower of conversations between ground controllers and the crew of the T-43 carrying Brown.
In addition, officials expect to recover data tapes taken from Air Force AWACS radar planes on routine patrol over the Balkans as part
of the peacekeeping mission in Bosnia.
Brown's plane was carrying six Air Force crew members, 27 American passengers, and two Croatians, Estes said. As of midday yesterday, search crews had recovered 33 bodies, including Brown's. There were no survivors.
Because the plane, a military version of a Boeing 737, was purchased in 1973 for training navigators rather than carrying passengers, it was not equipped with the flight recorders, Estes said.
But as of 1988, the Air Force converted the plane for VIP travel and other passenger uses from its home at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, without backfitting the aircraft
with the black boxes. This ran counter to a general Air Force policy that VIP and other passenger-style planes be equipped with the voice and data recorders.
"We have not been able to ascertain why this particular aircraft was not equipped with them," said Maj. Robin Chandler, an Air Force spokeswoman.
"If a commercial customer asked us, 'Gee, we'd like to take delivery without flight data recorders, we couldn't do that because the FAA wouldn't sign off," said Boeinger representative Liz Verdier. "There's a big difference between commercial and military."
A senior defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said combat aircraft are generally
not equipped with the recorders for fear that if the planes crashed in enemy territory, the tapes would provide a neat summary of the aircraft's capability.
As a 20-year-old aircraft, the T-43 was equipped with older-generation hydraulic and mechanical controls. Those are much more complicated and expensive to connect to data recorders than newer, wire-controlled planes. Verdier said the job could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The voice data recorder, installed in the cockpit, captures pilot and copilot conversations and ground communications and can pick up loud noises such as instrument panel alarms, bangs, or major engine malfunctions.
Woman pregnant for 15 years, finds fetus skeleton
The Associated Press
SAO PAULO, Brazil — The 62-year-old widow didn't have the faintest idea what was causing the pain on the right side of her stomach. So she went to the doctor's office, where X-rays revealed quite a surprise — a perfectly formed petrified skeleton of a fetus.
"It is an extremely rare case," said Jose Remigio Neto, chief obstetrician at the Hospital das
Clinicas in the northeastern city of Recife, 1,700 miles from Sao Paulo.
"The fetus has been inside her abdominal cavity, near the intestines, for at least 15 years, which is when she said she last had sexual relations," Remigio Neto by phone.
"I was shocked when I was told I had been pregnant for so long, because during all this time my belly never swelled," the widow, Antonieta Hilario, told The O
Estado de Sao Paulo newspaper on Wednesday.
Remigio Neto did not know exactly how old the 20-inch-long fetus was when it died nor its sex.
"We should be able to determine these things when we remove the fetus surgically," he said. "It does appear, however, that the baby was about to be born when it died inside its mother's body."
No date has been set for surgery, Neto said.
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