Sun peeked through 'worst storm in a decade'

At 2:10 p.m. Croatia time, on April 3, 1996, Capt. Amir Sehic landed a twin-engine corporate jet at Cilipi Airport, about 10 nautical miles south of Dubrovnik on the Adriatic coast.

Sehic's jet carried the Croatian prime minister and American Ambassador Peter Galbraith. It was followed immediately by a Swiss Air charter carrying executives from the Enron corporation. The impressively clairvoyant Enron execs had chosen to take their own plane.

About 15 minutes earlier, Ron Brown's CT-43A, the military version of a Boeing 737, had left Tuzla in Bosnia, 130 miles to the northeast. Capt. Sehic watched as the rain ceased and the sky brightened. At 2:48 p.m., he called the incoming plane from his cockpit and told the pilots that the weather was, in his words, "on the minima," meaning above the minimum standards needed to land.

Because of the cloud cover, U.S. Air Force Capts. Ashley Davis and Tim Shafer were flying an instrument approach into Cilipi. The only ground instrument the pilots could follow was an NDB – a non-directional radio beacon – on Kolocep Island. This was not of great concern to Davis. An evaluator pilot, he had recently tested "proficient" on this kind of approach. At 2:54 p.m., the plane passed over the radio beacon, seemingly on course and cleared for a landing.

The pilots descended through the clouds – at an appropriate approach speed – to an altitude of 2,200 feet, smoothly and consistently, guiding themselves by the one beacon behind them. Only in the final seconds of their young lives did Davis and Shafer realize they were off course. Just three minutes after last contact with the control tower, St. John's Peak rose up right in front of them, nearly two miles inland from the runway.

At 2:57 p.m., the craft sideswiped the jagged hillside, clipping its right wing and engine and cracking off the tail before any of the passengers even had a chance to pray for deliverance. The fuselage then skidded violently across the rocky slope, breaking up as it slid, disgorging its passengers randomly, and finally crunching to a fiery halt with the crew, likely dead or unconscious, trapped inside.

For several confusing and controversial hours, NATO helicopters searched the Adriatic in vain. At 6:45 p.m., a local villager called the police to tell them that earlier in the afternoon he had heard a plane fly low overhead, followed by a loud "grating sound" and then an explosion.

At that moment, a local police chief was driving toward the hills for the simple reason that this "was the area that wasn't searched so far." When the message was relayed to him, he headed toward St. John's Peak. At 7:20 p.m., he called in the first official visual confirmation of the wreckage.

It was not until 8:30 p.m. that Croatian police spotted two women lying under debris in the tail of the plane. They had presumed them both dead until, at 9:30 p.m., they heard one of them, Tech. Sgt. Shelly Kelly, make an "ah" sound. She was bleeding from her mouth and nose and from her leg.

At 10:36 p.m., a U.S. MH-53 helicopter took off from Cilipi in an attempt to airlift the survivor out, but was repeatedly beaten back by the now stormy weather. At 11:15 p.m., Croatian police put Kelly on a stretcher and carried her down the hill. At the bottom, they transferred her to a waiting ambulance. A Croatian physician pronounced her dead on the way to the hospital.

Rumors would spread that Kelly was seen climbing onto a rescue helicopter under her own power, only to succumb later to a slashed femoral artery. The New York Times may have fed the rumors by claiming the police found her alive two hours earlier than they actually had, and that "she tried to stand up, and lost consciousness." But the Times was wrong, and rumors of her murder were just that. An entirely credible autopsy – something Brown was denied – would confirm she died of an "ill-defined cervical fracture," a broken neck.

The first American rescuers would not reach the peak until 2:30 a.m. Within hours, on orders from Washington, they authorized an "accident investigation." This was the first time ever on friendly soil that the U.S. Air Force skipped the "mishap" stage of an investigation and presumed an accident.

On that same day, without any hard information, the political people hastened to dispel any notion of terrorism or sabotage. "The weather yesterday, as the plane flew in, was terrible," said Peter Galbraith. He then shifted from overstatement to outright dissembling. "In fact, people in Dubrovnik say that this is the worst storm in a decade." His remark was picked up widely by the media and, without any substantiation, transformed into fact.

Defense Secretary William Perry had flown on the same plane only days earlier. So had Hillary and Chelsea a week or so before that. Coincidentally, they had flown into Tuzla as well. In an oddly indiscreet moment, Perry told reporters on his way back to Washington from Egypt: "It was a classic sort of an accident that good instrumentation should be able to prevent." He was in no position to know that or say it.

As to the president, he made the serendipitous connection between this sad day – April 4, a day after the crash – and a comparably sad one 28 years earlier when Martin Luther King was slain in Memphis. Like King, claimed the president, Brown died "answering a very important challenge of his time.

Clinton did not elaborate that this "important challenge" was brokering a sweetheart deal between a fascist dictator and the Enron Corporation.

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Jack Cashill is an Emmy-award winning independent writer and producer with a Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue.

flying an NDB approach to minimums is tough

Twaddle!

NDB approaches would be tough if they had the same minimums as other approaches, but they don't. When you break out at ILS minimums (200 feet above the ground) you only have a few seconds before you land. I don't have any approach books here but my recollection is that the NDB approaches at the airport near my home are 1000 feet above ground level which means you have quite a bit more time before you actually land. (You have more to do too like visually find the runway, but if you do things right it's not too hard.)

My guess is that the thing that made the Cilipi approach tough that day is that someone was spoofing the radio signal that the ADF (automatic direction finder, the instrument used for NDB approaches) was pointing to. That is someone set up a transmitter in the hills near the airport and broadcast a stronger signal on the frequency used for that approach. (NDB approaches use AM radio frequencies and the instrument used just points to where the signal is coming from. Content doesn't matter; only strength.)

ML/NJ

FYI:

Accuracy In Media
Weekly Column
A Shocking Analysis Of A Deadly Crash
By Reed Irvine
February 25, 1999
Hugh Sprunt, a lawyer and CPA, with degrees from MIT and Stanford Law School, has an interesting hobby. He uses his analytical skills to investigate investigations. He studies official investigative reports painstakingly to see if the conclusions are supported by the evidence, and he often finds errors, some sloppy and some deliberate, that call the findings into question.
Sprunt has carefully studied the 7,000-page report on the Air Force investigation of the crash that killed Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown. Several things bothered him about the case. Why was the plane eight degrees off course even though it was making a simple instrument approach? Why was Niko Jerkic, the man who was responsible for maintaining the navigational aids at the airport, found shot to death before investigators could question him?
The Air Force investigation concluded that the flight crew disregarded the instructions on their charts. It said that instead of tuning their navigational radio to the beacon designated as CV, which is located 1.9 miles in front of the runway where they were to land, they kept their radio tuned to the beacon they had just passed, KLP, which is located 11.8 miles away.
That was contrary to what both the charts and common sense said they should do. If they tuned to the CV beacon, their radio display would show an arrow pointing directly to the runway. It would also tell them when they reached the missed approach point, the point at which they would have to abort the landing if the ground was not clearly visible.
If they stayed tuned to the KLP beacon, the arrow would be pointing back to it. They could navigate that way, but it would be more complicated and more risky. The Air Force investigators decided they had made that choice. For one thing, that made it easier to explain why they were off course. For another, the cockpit channel selector indicator on the navigational radio was tuned to the KLP beacon. However, the control head was tuned to the CV beacon. It appears that someone changed the channel selector after the crash to make it appear that the accident was caused by the failure of the crew to tune to CV. Perhaps they didn’t know that changing the channel selector when there is no electric power doesn’t change the control head, but it worked. The Air Force investigators ignored the discrepancy.
The Air Force investigation report includes radar data from an AWACS plane that was tracking the Brown flight. Sprunt’s analysis of these data indicates that the crew tuned to the CV beacon. The radar data show that a minute after they passed KLP, when they were only three minutes away from landing, they made a sharp turn to the left followed by a less-sharp right turn, straightening out on a course that took them straight into the mountain 75 seconds later.
Pilots don’t make major course adjustments when landing, without good reason. Sprunt suggests that when the crew tuned their receiver to the CV beacon, the arrow on the display showed that they were much farther off course than they expected. They made the two sudden turns to get on what they thought was the correct course.
Sprunt says, "If the signal had been coming from the CV beacon near the airport, the directional arrow in those last 75 seconds would have fairly shouted to the crew that the aircraft was well off course. It crashed 2 miles to the left of the runway. If, as the Air Force claims, the plane's navigational radio had remained tuned to the KLP beacon, any turns necessary to correct its course would have commenced immediately after over-flying the beacon and would have been relatively small."
This means that during those last three minutes, the navigational radio was tuned to a beacon located eight degrees to the left of the runway, at the foot of the mountain, operating on the same frequency as CV. Absent a better explanation, it seems clear that someone lured the plane off course by a portable beacon, turning it on when the pilots radioed that they were approaching KLP and turning off the CV beacon for five minutes.
That would have required the cooperation of Niko Jerkic, who was responsible for maintaining the beacon. He was found shot to death three days after the accident and was never questioned by the investigators. His death was quickly ruled a suicide. The Air Force reported that a beacon had been stolen from the airport sometime before the crash.
The sudden radical changes in the plane's course are not even mentioned in the Air Force investigation report. Maj. Gen. Charles H. Coolidge, who headed the investigation board, claims that his technical experts told him that the sudden turns were anomalies of no significance but he hasn’t responded to Hugh Sprunt’s request for an explanation of why they are not significant.

ML/NJ

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