10 Killed in Collision of Two Planes : Crash Spills Debris, Bodies in Suburb of Salt Lake City

SALT LAKE CITY —  A twin-engine commuter airliner and a small private airplane collided in the sky near Salt Lake City on Thursday, killing at least 10 people and hurling a tangle of wreckage and bodies across a 40-block section of the suburban neighborhood below.

Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Lt. John Malmborg said at least one house was damaged by falling debris, but there were no fires and no reports of death or injury to anyone on the ground.

A spokesman for the Salt Lake County Coroner’s office said investigators determined that eight people were on board the commuter airliner and two in the smaller airplane, and all were killed.

Search for Victims

Police, sheriff’s deputies and firefighters rushed to the snow-covered crash site about 12 miles southwest of downtown Salt Lake City in the suburb of Kearns, and began the search for victims.

“Bodies, parts of bodies, and pieces of the plane (were) scattered over a 40-block area,” Malmborg said. “Both of the aircraft seem to have come to pieces while they were still in the air. Some of the people on board just flew out into empty space.

“We had at least 300 people searching, but we had to suspend operations at sunset. Too cold and too dark. We’ll begin again at dawn.”

Skywest Flight 834

Federal Aviation Administration spokesmen identified the larger airplane as Skywest Airlines Metroliner Flight 834, a propjet commuter flight en route from Pocatello, Ida., to Salt Lake International Airport. The commuter plane disappeared from radar screens at 12:58 p.m.

The smaller craft, they said, was a single-engine blue-and-white Mooney M-20 that had just taken off on a training flight from Airport No. 2, an airstrip near the crash site, and was not picked up on radar.

Authorities said it appeared that the collision occurred inside the Salt Lake International Airport Radar Surveillance Area, an aerial corridor that aircraft can enter only with permission and in which they are required to maintain positive contact with FAA approach or traffic control facilities.

The commuter airliner, they said, was in radio and radar contact with FAA controllers at the time of the collision, but there appeared to be no record of such contact with the Mooney.

Tom Doyle, assistant air traffic manager at Salt Lake International Airport, said the Skywest flight was at 7,000 feet--just below the bottom of the clouds and about to turn into its final approach--when the collision occurred.

“We were working him on our radar,” Doyle said. “We had not (yet) handed him off to the tower for a visual approach. We just turned him on what we call a base leg, which is perpendicular to his flight path inbound. The next turn would have been direct to the runway.”

Visibility 30 Miles

Another FAA spokesman said visibility below the clouds at the time of the collision was about 30 miles.

Airport officials said the commuter airliner can carry 18 passengers plus a crew of two, but Skywest Vice President Ron Reber said only six passengers and two crew members were on board the Metroliner when it left Pocatello.

A management spokesman at Airport No. 2 said the Mooney could carry four people, but only an instructor and student pilot were aboard at the time of the collision.

Parts of the Mooney crashed through the roof of the house Rebekah Whitlock shares with U.S. Army recruiter Gary Boxx, 29.

‘A Gun or Nuclear War?’

“I was mopping the floor,” Whitlock said, “when I heard a big boom. I thought, ‘Is it a gun or is it a nuclear war?’ I walked down the hall, opened the door, and there was this, this--airplane--in my bedroom! With a wheel sticking up through the roof!

“The engine was in the middle of the water bed.

“So I had a little nervous breakdown then. But now I’m fine. I’m only 20 years old, but I feel 80 . . . and my house is really air conditioned. So we’re staying with friends tonight.”

A major section of the Skywest airplane smashed into a residential street still partly covered by a recent snowfall.

Darwin Smith, who lives in the point of impact, told authorities he saw the debris come to earth.

No Signs of Life

“I saw the fuselage . . . kind of floating down from the sky,” he said. “As we approached the fuselage, we saw the bodies of what appeared to be two boys in the wreckage.” There were no signs of life, he added.

Parts of two bodies fell in the parking lot and on the front steps at St. Francis Xavier Roman Catholic Church and School, where sheriff’s deputies subsequently set up an emergency morgue and command post.

Sister Marilyn Beck, a teacher at the school, said she was sitting in her office and “thought someone was up shoveling snow on the roof. Seconds later, I heard a kind of crash. I ran downstairs to see what was going on.

“That’s when I found part of a body. It seemed to be a leg. . . .”

Students Evacuated

The school’s staff and 80 students were immediately evacuated from the area, and the sheriff’s department set up barricades to keep out all but official vehicles.

Three blood-smeared airliner seats landed on the roof of Debbie Snyder’s ranch-style house.

“All I heard,” she said, “was three loud booms and a crash. When the seats hit the roof, it shook the house it hit so hard.

“We saw the seats. We saw the tail section.”

Ronald Noel, 14, told sheriff’s deputies he was shoveling snow in the driveway of his parents’ home when the collision occurred.

“I heard a whistling noise,” he said, “and I looked up and then the planes hit each other. The little one was going north and the big one to the northeast when they hit. The big one hit the little one about the middle of the front and split it right in half. There was no smoke or explosion or anything. They just hit and it was like crumbling wood. Just . . . smash!

“The way it looked, it was coming right down on top of me.

‘I Was Trying to Run’

“It shocked me for a minute. I was trying to run but I couldn’t move. . . .”

Ronald said he saw “what looked like three pieces of wood” fall from the sky.

“After they hit the ground,” he said, “I could see it was parts of bodies, so I came home and I got some blankets and went and covered them up.”

As darkness fell, the blue lights of emergency vehicles provided almost the only illumination in the crash area. Most homes were dark. Authorities explained that debris had evidently severed power lines, and repair crews were hampered by high winds that sent the wind chill factor down to the equivalent of 20 degrees below zero.

Gregory Feith, an air safety investigator from the Denver Field office of the National Transportation Safety Board, said eyewitness reports indicated that both airplanes were in straight and level flight at the time they collided.

Airliner on Radar

“From their descriptions,” he said, “it appears that the left wing of the Mooney hit the right nose of the Metroliner.”

He said FAA controllers at Salt Lake City had only the Skywest airliner plotted on their radar at the time of the collision, but emphasized that no conclusions have been drawn as yet since the investigation has not really begun.

“So far,” he explained, “we’ve just been talking to a few people, sheriff’s deputies and firefighters some of the air controllers and what witnesses we could find in the first few hours. We have nothing definite as yet. We’ll have to reconstruct the accident to see how it happened.”

Nonetheless, he discounted Salt Lake County Sheriff Pete Hayward’s announcement that searchers had discovered the Metroliner’s “black box.” Neither airplane, he said, was equipped with a flight data recorder or cockpit voice recorder.

Echoes of Cerritos Crash

The question of whether the collision occurred inside or outside the boundaries of the Airport Radar Surveillance Area stirred echoes of last year’s collision between an Aeromexico DC-9 and a private airplane over Cerritos, which claimed 82 lives.

Subsequent investigation disclosed that the smaller airplane, a Cherokee Archer, had apparently blundered into Los Angeles International Airport’s highly restricted Terminal Control Area (TCA), where all aircraft are required to indicate their position with transponders as well as maintaining radio contact with FAA controllers.

Investigators said the Archer’s lack of contact with controllers in the TCA was a major factor in the ensuing disaster.

Feith said the NTSB’s probe of the Salt Lake City crash will begin officially today, under the direction of Dr. John Lauber, who also headed the Cerritos investigation, and one of the first goals will be to determine “if (the Mooney) was flying in airspace where he should not have been.”

Thursday’s disaster was Skywest’s second midair collision in six years. On Sept. 24, 1981, another Skywest Metroliner collided with a smaller private airplane near Flagstaff, Ariz. On that occasion, however, both airplanes were able to land safely.

Staff writer Ted Thackrey Jr. in Los Angeles contributed to this report.