Reporter-News Archives

Thursday, February 19, 1998

Mail carrier recounts watching crash

By JOHN LUCAS / Evansville Courier

MATTOON, Ky. -- Eddie Hendrix was nearing the end of his rural mail route Wednesday afternoon when he saw a fireball reflected in the rearview mirror of his pickup.

"I thought that looks just like it's at the house," he said, thinking a propane gas tank there might have exploded.

He rushed the two or so miles home to learn a B-1B bomber had crashed into a pasture field about a 100 yards behind his 150-year-old farmhouse.

The plane, on a training mission from Dyess Air Force Base near Abilene, Texas, roared out of the low clouds to plow a 6- to 8-foot-deep gash 100 yards long into his field. The impact and explosion ripped the plane into steering-wheel size fragments of smoldering aluminum and scattered them for three-fourths of a mile across the field and into a wooded hillside.

Late Wednesday evening, Hendrix was still looking for the 25 cattle that had been in the field when the plane crashed. He didn't think they had been killed, but the crash had knocked down fences.

A half-dozen news helicopters noisily circling the farm made it impossible to attempt to round them up, he said, and made it difficult to corral five horses into a barn lot.

No one on the ground was injured from the crash. No one was at home at the Hendrix residence or another house a half-mile across the field from the crash site.

The B-1B's four-member crew had ejected from the plane about 12 miles southwest of the crash site. Two of the crew members walked to a house to call for assistance, and the other two were found in a woods by Crittenden County Rescue Squad and emergency services personnel. One of the airmen had to be cut from a tree after his parachute became entangled, Crittenden County DES Coordinator Greg Rushing said.

Taken initially to Crittenden County Hospital, all were transferred to other hospitals. Two were taken by helicopter to Vanderbilt University Hospital at Nashville, Tenn. The other two were taken to Blanchford Memorial at Fort Campbell near Hopkinsville.

An Air Force investigative team from Scott Air Force Base in Southern Illinois was expected to arrive here Wednesday to begin the task of determining what caused the massive plane to crash. A military police detail from Fort Campbell, along with members of the local Kentucky National Guard company from Marion, was to secure the scene Wednesday night.

Witnesses to the crash said the plane was making a tremendous noise as it flew its last few miles.
"I knew it couldn't be very high," said Wayne Keeling, who was outside on the porch of his home about two miles from the crash site when the bomber came over.

"I thought it was above the clouds," he said, "but it kept roaring so I just kept looking for it."

Keeling said he saw it just before it crashed and burst into a fireball.

Lynn and Colin Wyatt, on a four-wheeler on their farm less than a mile from the crash, heard the roar of the plane above the sound of their vehicle.

"I looked up and just seen it going over," Mrs. Wyatt said.

"I said it's getting awful low," she said. "My husband said: "It's getting too low,' and as soon as he said that, it went right into the ground."

They estimated the B-1B was probably no higher than 200 to 300 feet above the ground just before it crashed.

The explosion produced a huge, reddish orange fireball that lasted only a couple of seconds, he said.

"It felt like something smacked you on the ears real hard," Mrs. Wyatt said.

Jim Roberts, who lives across the field from where the plane went down, said he and his wife, Mary, were away from home when the crash occurred. They came home just a few minutes later to find that plastic sheathing over a screened-in porch had been blown loose and ceiling tiles inside their home knocked loose.

"I came home and thought what in the devil done all that," he said. "It just shredded the plastic."

Hendrix said the force of the explosion had apparently blown open interior doors on the second floor and in the basement of his house.

Members of the Crittenden County DES and rescue squad headed to the site initially unaware the crew had ejected.

"It looked like I was having a sale up here," Hendrix said, of the number of cars and trucks that went to his farm. But once rescue squad members learned the crew members had been located,
Rushing said DES's role was to secure the perimeter and prevent sightseers from entering the field.

As news of the crash spread, cars quickly crowded the narrow, one-lane roads nearest the site nerar U.S. 60. Most people stopped to look at the distant field, some with field glasses, while a few slogged the mile or so across the muddy field toward the still-smoldering grass.

Courier staff writer Tom Raithel contributed to this report.