Reporter-News Archives

Thursday, February 19, 1998

"It's a miracle the plane didn't take out half a town"

By RICHARD HORN / Abilene Reporter-News

Timothy Barker steered his pickup into a ditch Wednesday as he watched a B-1B bomber soar over the trees and crash in a Kentucky field, a mere 700 feet from a farmhouse.

"It's a miracle those men were saved, and it's a miracle the plane didn't take out half a town," Barker said Monday in a telephone interview from Marion, Ky., hours after a Dyess Air Force Base B-1B bomber went down. "If he kept it from landing in town, that pilot's a hero. A lot of folks could have died."

The four crew members parachuted to safety near Mexico, Ky. Witnesses said the bomber traveled over part of downtown Marion, population 5,000, crashing near Matoon, about 14 miles from where the crew ejected.

One of the crew members told a rescuer "it went into chaos and we all bailed out," said Chris Evans, editor of the Crittendon Press.

Several Mexico residents saw the men parachuting and rushed to help, he said.

Two crew members landed in a clearing and walked to the road, he said.

"They had some cuts on their faces, but otherwise they were OK," he said.

Rescuers found the two other men in a wooded area about 30 minutes later, Evans said. One landed in a tree, was incoherent and seemed to be the most seriously injured, he said. He apparently had head and neck injuries, Evans said.

Several witnesses said they thought the engines quit.

"I heard it roaring and looked toward Marion," said Beverly Herrin. "By the time it came into sight, everything was quiet. It was gliding at about a 20-degree angle."

"It could have been a lot more serious than it turned out to be," Evans said. "Had it come down four miles shy of where it did, it would have hit a very populated area."

The bomber crashed about 700 feet from Eddie Hendrix' farmhouse. Hendrix, a postal worker, was delivering mail a couple of miles away and looked in his rearview mirror to see a fireball and mushroom cloud.

"I thought my house exploded," he said. "A state road crew that watched it go down said it just barely, barely missed my house. They told me it looked like someone was flying it and they swerved to miss the house."

A neighbor's house about a half-mile away suffered minor damage, he said. The concussion of the explosion blew another neighbor's back door open, he said.

Hendrix was still looking for the 25 cattle grazing in the field, though he didn't think any of them had been killed. Some may have been injured by shrapnel, he said.

Witnesses disagreed about whether they heard one explosion or two. Word spread quickly around town that the plane had blown apart in mid-air.

"It don't look like to me it exploded first," Hendrix said. "It looked to me like it hit the ground and traveled before it blew up."

But Billy Hinchee, who was in a trailer about a mile from the crash site, said he's sure he heard two explosions.

"We heard a boom and I thought it was a jet that broke the sound barrier," he said. "A second later, I looked out the back window and heard another boom when it crashed, and saw the fireball."

People rushed to the crash site, and when they spotted Air Force wreckage began worrying bombs might be on board, said Mark Campbell of Bowling Green, Ky., who was driving by and stopped to see if there were any survivors.

Debris included an operator's manual and military-style maps, he said.

"Everybody started thinking about Iraq, because we thought it might have been heading there," he said.

Dyess officials said the bomber was unarmed and on a training mission.

"There's not enough of the plane left to tell much," Evans said. "There's probably a dozen pieces that were big enough you'd need a pickup truck to move them. But the rest are tiny, as small as your fingernail."