Wing Tips Fell Off Before Crash

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31755, 12 August 1968, Page 13

Wing Tips Fell Off Before Crash

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright)

WINDEN-AM-AIGN (Germany), August 11.

Plane crashes killed 80 people yesterday. In Winden-am-Aign the chief investigator of a British Viscount plane crash said last night that both wing tips fell off simultaneously more than a mile before the crash and “sabotage or lightning cannot yet be ruled out,” United Press International reported. Captain Max Brandennberg, chief of the West German Aviation Safety Offices investigation department, held a news conference in a tent at the crash site where 48 persons were killed when the British Eagle Viscount crashed, apparently while trying to make an emergency landing on the autobahn.

“The wing tips must have fallen off at the same time because they were found lying close together,” Captain Brandenberg said.

He said they were found about 1.2 miles from the embankment of the autobahn into which the airliner crashed. “An untold number of causes might have preceded

the falling off of the wings,” Captain Brandenberg said. “Sabotage or lightning cannot yet be ruled out.” N.Z.P.A. - Reuter reported that searchers were combing debris of the crashed Viscount for parts of its "black box” flight recorder. It might hold the key to one of the most baffling air disasters of recent times.

Captain Brandenburg said parts of the black box, in which all aspects of the plane's performance were re-

corded, had been found, but it had been smashed by the impact. The searchers, who included a West German investigation team and experts from Vickers, the manufacturers of the Viscount, were probing the fields and grass embankment beside the autobahn trying to piece the “black box” together. “We hope that the information we need is still in the box,” Captain Brandenburg said.

A police spokesman at Langenbruck, headquarters of the crash investigation, said the bodies of all 44 passengers and four crew members had been recovered.

The bodies were badly chared and dismembered, strewn along with the burned and twisted aircraft wreckage on the concrete highway and its flanking fields of hop vines.

All but three victims—a couple from Haifa, Israel, and an Austrian—were Bitish.

Most were believed to be holidaymakers heading for the Austrian Alps. The pilot. Captain E. E. (John) Dawdy, aged 42, was formerly of Auburn, New South Wales. In Charleston, West Virginia. 32 people were killed and five injured when a twinturboprop aircraft of Piedmont Airlines crashed and burned in fog at Charleston’s mountain-top airport yesterday. Of the five people dragged alive from the wreckage, three were reported in critical condition in hospital last night.