ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, December 25, 1996 TAG: 9612260047
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: HOLIDAY
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG
SOURCE: MARK CLOTHIER STAFF WRITER
The investigation into why a DC-8 cargo plane rammed a Giles County mountainside 31 minutes into a routine maintenance flight Sunday, killing all six people aboard, is on hold for Christmas.
The inquiry into the Airborne Express flight from North Carolina to Ohio is set to resume Thursday.
Meanwhile, the families of the victims are struggling to handle a particularly ill-timed tragedy.
"As hard as it's going to be, Santa's still coming tomorrow night," Gina Athey, the wife of maintenance man Kenneth Athey, said Monday in Winston-Salem, N.C. "If he didn't, I'd have two very upset little boys."
Neither Gina Athey nor Lynn Scully, wife of Brian Scully of Walkertown, N.C., a cockpit electronics specialist, knew her husband was going on the test flight.
"That was fine with me," Athey said. "I didn't want to know. I always worried."
A Scully family relative said Monday that Scully's wife, Lynn, and their children, 7-year-old Erin and 4-year-old Thomas, will probably move back to New York to live closer to family.
"The kids are asking where he is now," the relative said. "What do you tell them?"
Investigators pulled the flight data and cockpit voice recorders from the crash site late Monday morning. A few hours later, the "black boxes" were being analyzed at the National Transportation Safety Board's Washington, D.C., labs.
The 29-year-old plane's crew made a distress call at 6:06 p.m., 26 minutes into a round-trip test flight from Greensboro, N.C., to Wilmington, Ohio. Five minutes later, it crashed into a forest 3,400 feet up East River Mountain.
Five of the men on board worked for ABX Air Inc., an Airborne Express affiliate that operates a hub and sorting operation in Wilmington, about 40 miles northeast of Cincinnati. The sixth man, Scully, worked for Greensboro-based Triad International Maintenance Corp., or TIMCO, which received the plane in June and had recently configured it for ABX's use.
The three members of the flight crew were Garth Avery, 48, of Dayton, Ohio; William "Keith" Leming, 37, of Lebanon, Ohio; and Terry Waelti, 52, of Wilmington.
The others on board were Scully, 36, and two ABX maintenance workers: Athey, 39, and Edward "Bruce" Goettsch, 48, of Wilmington.
Jim Flanagan, a spokesman for TIMCO's parent company, Massachusetts-based Primark Inc., wouldn't discuss the work being done or the test being performed on the plane during Sunday's flight. The company does not repair engines. He said test flights with both TIMCO and client officials on board are standard procedure. Flanagan said this is the first crash of a TIMCO-serviced plane.
The 7-year-old company's earnings have soared in recent years as the firm attracted more customers. Besides Airborne Express, TIMCO's clients include cargo carriers Emery Worldwide and United Parcel Service and passenger airlines Continental and Northwest.
The NTSB investigation is three-pronged. It looks at what was left on the Giles mountainside and what's been sent to the NTSB lab, including the flight data and cockpit voice recorders. It also looks at background. The plane's maintenance record and general history are checked, as are the flight crew's medical histories. Mechanics who worked on the plane and people who knew the flight crew are also interviewed.
It likely will be months before the NTSB releases the contents of the cockpit voice recordings and flight information.
What's known is what the NTSB is likely to find. The cockpit recorder will tell investigators what the cockpit microphones picked up during 30 of the flight's 31 minutes. Cockpit recorders run on a 30-minute loop.
Cockpit microphones are sensitive enough that, in addition to the voices of the flight crew and air traffic controllers, ambient sounds such as engine noises can offer clues.
The flight data recorder stores plane characteristics, everything from speed to impact angle to altitude. A computer program at the NTSB decodes the stored information.
The Greensboro News & Record contributed to this report.
LENGTH: Medium: 79 linesby CNB