Graham Warwick/ATLANTA
A US AIR FORCE Boeing T-43A is believed to have been off course when it crashed into a hill in stormy weather with poor visibility on the approach to Dubrovnik Airport in Croatia on 3 April.
All 33 passengers and crew, including US Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, were killed. The aircraft, a military 737-200, was not equipped with cockpit-voice or flight-data recorders.
The T-43A was carrying Brown and US businessmen from Tuzla, Bosnia, to Dubrovnik as part of a commercial mission to discuss reconstruction projects in the former Yugoslavia. Three aviation-industry executives scheduled to accompany Brown were not on the flight: Boeing Commercial Airplane Group president Ron Woodard, DynCorp president Daniel Bannister and Northwest Airlines co-chairman Alfred Checchi.
The T-43 had been cleared for an instrument approach to runway 12 at Dubrovnik's Cilipi Airport. No problems had been reported to the control tower. The aircraft disappeared from radar at 14.52 local time, about 5min before it was expected to land.
Wreckage was found on top of a 2,300ft (700m)-high ridge, 3km (1.5nm) northwest of the runway threshold. There was no evidence of hostile fire, the USAF says.
At the time, horizontal visibility was given as 1,000m and vertical visibility 90m. Heavy rain impeded rescue attempts. Based at Ramstein AB in Germany, the T-43 was built in 1973, had accumulated 17,000h and 12,000 landings and had undergone a major inspection in June 1995. The USAF operates 12 T-43s, as navigation trainers and passenger transports.
Source: Flight International
