Plan for Jet Crash Hits Turbulence

If you were ever looking for nowhere, Jerry Grott beat you to it.

On a seemingly endless floor of cracked earth and sun-baked rock, in an area of the Mojave Desert where the nearest road sign reads “Next Services 100 Miles,” Grott lives alone, mining salt. Outside the concrete cabin where he sleeps in a chair, there’s not a scrap of life in sight--not even a lizard.

“I love it out here,” Grott said.

And as the 78-year-old miner learned a few years ago, so do other folks. One of the largest, most dramatic-looking desert landscapes within striking distance of Los Angeles, Grott’s 1,840-acre salt mine east of Twentynine Palms has become a popular location for movie makers and photographers.

But recently, Grott, a scientist by training, a loner by choice, struck a deal that has put him in the middle of a flap involving environmentalists, federal officials, Fox TV and a group of former combat pilots. The ruckus is over a plan to intentionally crash an old passenger jet into Grott’s desert hideaway as part of a live TV special to be aired by Fox Broadcasting Co.

The crash, once proposed for next week, will now happen next spring if approved by federal and local officials, a Fox spokeswoman said.

And the special effects company working for Fox still hopes to use a dry lake bed on Grott’s property as the crash site because, well, it’s in the middle of nowhere and as barren as the moon.

Grott has been smitten with the crash idea since he heard about it three months ago.

“The first thing I thought was, ‘Hmm, wonder how much I can get for a location fee?’ ” Grott said.

Grott is going to have to wait a while for that money--as much as $30,000--if it ever comes. Because of all the risks involved, it will take several more weeks to review the crash proposal, Federal Aviation Administration officials said last week.

Burbank’s Brad Lachman Productions, which Fox hired to produce the proposed one-hour special, pulled out about two weeks ago after news reports publicized the plan, according to sources working on the project. Fox is now scrambling for another producer.

Officials with local agencies, including the San Bernardino County Fire Department and the Inland Empire Film Commission, say they still support the project, as long as it’s safe.

Grott insists it is. Dale Dry Lake is a six-mile slab of dried clay, cracked and textured like a mosaic. Thousands of years ago, Dale Lake was full of water. It dried up, leaving behind salt deposits that Grott extracts from evaporation ponds and sells for $60 a ton. Much of his product is used to salt roads in icy areas.

Environmentalists have argued that the crash could endanger government-protected desert tortoises. Grott said the only living things he has seen on the lake bed are trespassing motorcyclists, whom he used to run off with a .357 magnum tucked in his waist.

But there is life nearby. As a contingency plan, should the remote control system fail to guide the vintage Convair 990 to its target, the airliner would be fixed on a course to smash into the Sheep Hole Mountains, six miles away and home to protected bighorn sheep.

Some federal officials didn’t like that idea at all.

“Those mountains are designated to protect wilderness, not to crash planes,” said Celia Boddington, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Land Management, which has jurisdiction over the Sheep Holes. “It’s alarming to me that these people don’t have every confidence that the plane will land in the targeted area.”

The man who hopes to pilot the Convair, Capt. David Kennedy, a U.S. Navy test pilot on active duty, said there would be several backup systems to ensure that the plane hit its target even if it lost power or radio contact. The plan is for Kennedy and a crew of three to take off from Mojave Airport, fly 150 miles across the desert and parachute out five miles short of the lake bed. Then another Navy combat veteran would crash the plane via remote control from the cockpit of a rented fighter jet trailing the airliner.

“Of course we’re not here to kill any sheep,” Kennedy said. “But if we had to pick between the bighorns or Vegas, we’d pick the bighorns any day. Those mountains are our final backstop.”

Grott says he has enjoyed working with the pilots on the plan. He always wanted to be a combat flier himself and admits that that’s another reason he’s excited to be involved in the stunt crash.

During World War II, Grott was turned down for flight school because of imperfect vision, so he signed up as a paratrooper and earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart in the Battle of the Bulge. Combat injuries have made it uncomfortable for him to lie flat in bed, so he sleeps in a chair.

Grott, who graduated with a metallurgy degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been mining salt since the 1960s. His family optioned the Mojave salt mine in 1983 and later bought it from the Bronfman family, owners of Seagram Co. Grott’s wife lives in Phoenix and sends him frozen pork chops and other meals when he’s working in the desert, sometimes for several weeks straight.

His routine used to be simple: rising at 4 a.m., checking salt samples, puttering around the lab, driving heavy trucks across salt flats that crunch like snow.

But his participation in the crash project has made life more complicated. His phone rarely rang before, but now he gets harassing telephone calls-- including one in which a caller told Grott he should be strapped into the doomed plane.

He’s eager for the project to happen so he can get his location fees, but like everyone else involved, he’s not going to know for at least several weeks if the staged crash will be approved.

On a recent day in the desert, Grott wasn’t interested in talking about it. He wanted to talk salt.

“Did I tell you about how I can make bleach with an electrode, some salt and an Exercycle?” he asked a visitor.

And then he marched across a salt bed, his shoes crunching on the surface, a grin on his face as bright as the Mojave sun.