Army crash kills 4

DOERUN — Four Army soldiers died in a helicopter crash after it clipped a television transmitting tower early Thursday morning. Amazingly, a fifth crew member walked away from the wreckage.

Just after 8 a.m., the MH-47 Chinook helicopter en route from Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah to Ft. Rucker, Ala., hit the WFXL tower just off Ga. Highway 270 east of Doerun during a routine training flight. The military has yet to confirm the cause of the accident. The U.S. Army Combat Readiness Center from Fort Rucker is investigating.

All on board were assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne) at Hunter Army Airfield.

The Chinook, a helicopter with a front and rear rotor, appeared to have hit the tower with a rotor about 60 feet from the top of the 1,000-foot structure, taking a chunk out of the tower plus snapping a guy wire in the process. The WFXL tower stands alongside a WALB transmitting tower, which was not damaged. With one guy wire missing, the WFXL tower now has a slight, but dangerous, tilt.

The helicopter hit the tower with such force that three large pieces of the craft plus debris were slung over a quarter mile, witnesses and rescue workers confirmed. The Observer was able to see the cockpit, which was in the same cow pasture as the towers next to a fence lined with oaks and facing somewhat northeast.

AP update via "The Telegraph" (Macon, GA).

http://www.macon.com/mld/telegraph/14727535.htm

Posted on Fri, Jun. 02, 2006
Army investigators check site of fatal helicopter crash
By Elliott Minor
ASSOCIATED PRESS
DOERUN - Army investigators checked the site of a fatal military helicopter crash today, trying to determine why a special operations aircraft, equipped to navigate precisely at low altitudes and in the dark, clipped a wire on a communications tower in broad daylight and then broke apart and burned in a southwest Georgia field.

Four crewmen were killed in the Thursday morning crash of the MH-47 Chinook helicopter near the small town of Doerun, but a fifth escaped with minor injuries and was making a speedy recovery, officials said.

All five were members of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, also known as the Night Stalkers, an elite unit that uses MH-47 Chinooks to fly special forces commandos behind enemy lines under cover of night.

The crash occurred during a routine training flight from Savannah's Hunter Army Airfield - home to one of the 160th's three battalions - to Fort Rucker, Ala., where the Army's helicopter training school is located, officials said.

Lisa Eichhorn, a Fort Rucker spokeswoman, said Army crash investigators were on the scene Friday.

"The investigation has started in earnest," she said. "They're ... trained to do this kind of work. They're going to do a very thorough job and they're not putting any time constraints on it."

The Army has notified all the families of the dead soldiers and the names of the four victims should be released Saturday morning, Eichhorn said. Army policy mandates a 24-hour delay between notification and the release of names.

The chopper's crew was from the aviation regiment's 3rd Battalion, based at Hunter. Two other Night Stalker battalions are stationed at Fort Campbell, Ky.

The MH-47 has special equipment that allows the helicopter to fly nighttime, low-altitude missions with "pinpoint navigation accuracy," according to the Special Operations Command.

According to the National Weather Service, visibility was 10 miles with light winds and a 1,300-foot ceiling in Albany, the nearest reporting site, at about the time of the 8 a.m. crash.

The Chinook went down in the northwestern corner of Colquitt County after snagging a wire on a 1,000-foot TV tower belonging to WFXL, the Fox affiliate in Albany. Pieces of the aircraft scattered over a wide area, some landing in the yard of a nearby resident.

Pat Coffman, WFXL's program director and operations manager, said the crash left about 40 percent of the station's viewers without service. The tower was left with a pronounced tilt, and an engineer was checking it Friday to see if it safe enough to send up a repair crew, she said.

Michael Ford, a crop duster from Doerun, said there were low clouds when he began spraying crops about 6:30 as the sun came up. He returned to his landing strip about 90 minutes later and learned of the crash from another crop duster.

Ford said he jumped back in his plane and flew over the crash site.

"You couldn't see anything but fire," he said. "It was just a big ball of fire."

The WFXL tower is only about 150 yards from a similar tower that belongs to Albany's NBC affiliate, WALB. That tower was not damaged. Both were equipped with mandatory warning lights.

"It's not hard to see those TV towers," said Ford, who often flies at 100 to 300 feet. "But you've got to watch out for all these new cell phone towers.

"Really and truly, I don't see how they hit it, unless than were above the clouds and decided to come through the clouds," he said. "We've always seen helicopters around here. I don't understand how they didn't see those towers."

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