ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, April 4, 1996 TAG: 9604040091
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: The New York Times
A military plane carrying Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and a delegation of American corporate executives slammed into a Croatian mountainside Wednesday. Chances that Brown had survived were ``next to zero,'' a White House official said after more than 12 hours of rescue efforts.
The plane had been approaching the airport at Dubrovnik, on the Adriatic coast, in a storm.
Clambering over rocky, rugged terrain, working by flashlight in pelting rain, Croatian search parties found nine bodies and one survivor, a woman who died later, reports said.
But there was no definitive word on the fate of Brown, 54, a political insider who helped spark President Clinton's 1992 campaign. Glyn Davies, a State Department spokesman, said Wednesday night that all 33 people aboard the plane were presumed dead, but later retracted his comment, saying they were considered missing. Croatian television said all had died.
Searchers at the scene and officials in Washington said they held out almost no hope that survivors would be found. A U.S. military official in Germany said there was no indication that the plane had been downed by hostile action.
Commerce Department staff members were on board as well, including Charles Meissner, assistant secretary for international economic policy.
Names of the corporate executives aboard were not made public by the government, but some companies issued statements confirming that their executives had been on board.
One of those missing was Nathaniel C. Nash, 44, the Frankfurt bureau chief of The New York Times. He was accompanying Brown for an article on reconstruction efforts following the Bosnian civil war.
Several prominent businessmen who had at one point planned to make the trip did not do so. One was Alfred A. Checchi, co-chairman of Northwest Airlines, who elected instead to attend a White House state dinner Tuesday night.
A senior American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the pilot of Brown's plane had flown up a valley parallel to the one he should have followed before turning for his final approach. When he turned, he hit the mountain, the official said on the basis of reports from the scene.
Clinton went to Brown's Washington home to comfort the commerce secretary's wife, Alma, and then to the Commerce Department, where he spoke feelingly of the missing Cabinet member as ``a magnificent life force.''
Clinton said Brown, who ranged across the globe like none of his predecessors to develop markets for American business, had made the department ``what it was meant to be - an instrument for realizing the potential of every American.''
Brown's fund-raising and coalition-building skills, honed in election campaigns and in years as a lobbyist, proved invaluable to Clinton four years ago, when Brown was serving as the first black chairman of a major party.
Because Brown was under investigation by an independent counsel for purported financial irregularities, Clinton decided months ago not to name him, as previously planned, as chairman of his re-election campaign, but Brown remained a trusted presidential counselor.
The plane, reportedly carrying 27 passengers and six crew members, took off at lunchtime from Tuzla, Bosnia, for what should have been a routine flight. Brown had visited there with American troops attached to the NATO-led peacekeeping effort.
The plane vanished from radar screens at 2:52 p.m. local time (7:52 a.m. ET) as it neared Cilipi International Airport, about 15 miles southeast of Dubrovnik, a medieval walled city squeezed between mountains and the sea.
The plane, based at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany, was built in 1973 and had flown about 17,000 hours, Col. Virginia Pribyla of the Air Force said. She said that was about a half to a third of what a comparable commercial airplane of that age would have flown.
The plane had made 12,000 successful landings. Recently it ferried Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary William Perry around the region.
Although the Air Force had encountered no trouble with its version of the plane, the stubby, twin-engine civilian 737 has been the subject of intense investigation because of two still-unexplained airline crashes, one on Colorado Springs in 1991, the other in Pittsburgh in 1994.
More than 2,800 of the popular short-haul planes have been delivered; they have flown more than 63 million hours worldwide and have had only eight fatal accidents in the United States.
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: Chart by KRT: Flight and crash of Secretary Brown'sby CNBplane. color. KEYWORDS: FATALITY