Posted on 12/13/2005 2:52:34 PM PST by Perdogg
The plane carrying peacekeepers home from Sinai went down on takeoff at Gander.
By FREE PRESS NEWS SERVICES
GANDER, NFLD. -- Joe McGuire was at home asleep on the morning of Dec. 12, 1985, when the ring of his telephone jarred him awake with news that an airplane went down after takeoff from Gander International Airport.
The Arrow Air charter flight carried 248 U.S. soldiers and eight civilian crew.
McGuire, then assistant commander for the RCMP in Gander, rushed to the scene.
"When I got down there, it was still burning and everything was black," McGuire says in Gander, where he is now retired.
"There were bodies in the lower part of the site laying everywhere. Most of them were badly burnt."
Rescuers were held at bay by a wall of fire as 45,000 kilograms of jet fuel burned off.
As soon as they could, RCMP, Canadian military from the nearby 9 Wing base, firefighters and airport officials swept the crash area, a long stretch of sheared and burning forest. They were hoping to find survivors.
"There were none," McGuire says.
That was the hardest part, says McGuire, who was involved in the rescue following the crash of a Czechoslovakian State Airlines flight at the same airport in 1967 when 32 of 69 passengers survived.
"There were survivors, which gave the emergency services who responded to it a good feeling because there were people they could save," McGuire says. "In this instance, there was nobody."
Malinda Parris was preparing to welcome her husband, pilot Chief Warrant Officer Rudy Parris, home for the holidays. She had decorated the house for Christmas and filled the kitchen with his favourite foods.
She was dressing for the homecoming at an army base in Fort Campbell, Ky., when the television flashed the news.
"It was like jumping out of a helicopter or airplane. The fall was endless," says Parris, 61, of Herndon, Ky.
The soldiers had spent the previous six months in Sinai ensuring compliance with the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty.
Memorials were dedicated in Fort Campbell and Arlington national cemetery in Washington, and 248 maple trees were planted alongside a monument in nearby Hopkinsville, Ky. A statue marks the crash site in Gander.
Today, the U.S. Army will honour the soldiers with military and civil memorial ceremonies at Arlington, Fort Campbell and Hopkinsville.
In Gander, representatives of the 101st Airborne, the U.S. Embassy and Canadian Forces are expected at a memorial service and wreath-laying at the crash site.
12/12/05?
I should have said 12-12-1985
I read this yesterday...why the re post?
Got it.
I did a search, didn't find it. Sorry.
Could you fix that date please?
Some of us pay a lot of attention to these headlines, and that one is a bit disconcerting.
Anyone recall the cause of the Gander crash?
I lost a friend who was an OCS classmate in that accident. Thank you for the thread.
Icing was concluded to be the likely cause.
http://www.sandford.org/gandercrash/investigations/majority_report/html/_i.shtml
Arrow was found to have cut corners on maintenance.
They may have also taken off at too slow of a speed because they miscalculated the weight. While the weight was probably within the capacity of the plane, the pilots apparently pulled up before they should have.
Thanks for providing that link.
Like the 9-11 flights that I could easily have been on if my job interview at the time had been in California and not Florida (I was from New York City and odds were actually in favor of my having to fly to interview for a high tech job in California instead of Florida)...there was a fair to middling chance that I would have been on the 12-12-85 flight.
I had been assigned to Sheridan Kaserne in Augsburg in September of 1985 but had to wait months for my security clearance. If I had wanted, which I didn't in the least, I could have opted to take leave and visit my family in New York in the downtime before Christmas.
But I was fascinated with my first Adventzeit (Christmastime) in Germany, with Christkinldmaerkte in every Bavarian town. You still couldn't drag me away with a Bradley from Germany at this time of year.
Also, in 1985, I hadn't yet started to work for the UN in New York (that all started in the fall of 1988). Without the UN job, I would be invited to no parties and have no friends. Liberal New Yorkers would have thought nothing of an American soldier at the time. But I did take a military charter flight to see my family in March 1987, March being a very dull month in Germany.
I guess we could all play the "close call" game on tragic events. London Bombings: I had been trying hard to get a customer appointment west of London and they had once told me that July 7th or 8th might be a good time to meet, but quickly scheduled instead for late July. Then the bombings happened after the reschedule.
Berlin Disco "La Belle"...it probably wasn't "my crowd" and I was in Augsburg at the Field Station at the time of the bombing...but I could easily have had orders to work at the Berlin Field Station that month...and there was a small chance that I may have agreed to go with another soldier to that disco. He may have convinced me that the German girls who went to that disco were my type. When the disco exploded, I took it very personally. It was my mini-911. I remember I kept my big American car with American military issued license plates parked openly in a Turkish neighborhood of Munich in the time after the bombing when we were basically at war with Libya.
I would check under the seat of the car, and sometimes the hood, before I sat down and started the engine to go to work at 5AM.
Looking back at it...that was fairly gutsy because the car virtually screamed out to all the Turkish people in the neighborhood that it belonged to an American soldier. Then again...the Turks were never our enemies. I still don't get the impression that they are against us in this war and I still live in Germany.
was at FTCKY at the time, with the 326th ENGR Bn.- still enlisted, living in Lee Village- seems like every unit there had someone on that flight- we had a medic on it...it was the most somber, moving Division parade I was ever in, and I have been in a bunch...
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