DATE: Thursday, February 27, 1997           TAG: 9702270509

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A6   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES 

DATELINE: WASHINGTON                        LENGTH:   63 lines

MILITARY AIR CONTROLLER BLAMED FOR F-16'S NEAR MISS OF 727 A HOUSE PANEL WAS TOLD WEDNESDAY THAT PROPER PROCEDURES WERE NOT FOLLOWED.

A Navy admiral Wednesday acknowledged sharing responsibility for the close encounter earlier this month between an F-16 fighter jet and a civilian airliner off the coast of New Jersey, telling a House subcommittee that the military's air traffic controller had not followed proper procedures.

Rear Adm. Dennis V. McGinn, who heads the Navy branch in charge of the air traffic control center in Virginia Beach, which handles the military training area off New Jersey, said of the controller: ``His procedures and the phraseology he used over the radio in talking to the F-16 aircraft were not strictly in accordance with accepted procedures.''

Investigators have said that the military controller failed on the afternoon of Feb. 5 to tell two F-16 pilots from the Atlantic City, N.J., base of the New Jersey Air National Guard that they were supposed to stay away from a civilian plane that was in the airspace they planned to use for a training exercise.

Instead, one F-16 plane moved in on the civilian plane, a Nations Air flight en route to John F. Kennedy International Airport from San Juan, Puerto Rico, setting off a collision warning device in the civilian plane.

McGinn told the aviation subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee that the controller did not have a ``cavalier attitude,'' but had simply erred.

Likewise, Maj. Gen. Donald L. Peterson of the Air Force also took pains to emphasize that the pilots were not ``hot dogging'' and that the encounter was carried out in a controlled and disciplined manner.

The pilot of the civilian airliner involved in the incident, Capt. Richard J. McCune, also testified to the panel, offering his first public account. And it differed in one significant respect from the military's version. He maintained that ``we were in the clouds,'' while Peterson said the F-16 pilot had seen the 727, a description that would imply better visibility and a potentially less dangerous situation.

McCune said his plane did not leave the clouds until after it had steepened its descent in response to a collision warning, climbed sharply in response to another collision warning, and then made a turn. At one point in the roller coaster ride, two flight attendants and a passenger in the aisle were thrown to the cabin floor.

``You do get a little bit hairy to try to comply'' with the anti-collision system, McCune said, adding that the change from dive to climb was ``fairly drastic.'' The change increased the force of gravity on the passengers by about 60 percent, he said.

In his testimony, Peterson defended the military pilot's interception as prudent and well-controlled. ``If we can't fly our aircraft in a disciplined manner, we won't be successful in war, and certainly not in a peacetime environment,'' he said.

The pilot, he said, was trying to identify a jet that he perceived as ``a stranger'' and stay with it until it left the area. In the process, however, he set off the anti-collision alarm system in the passenger jet, prompting its crew, which was unable to see the fighter and unsure what was happening, to take dramatic evasive maneuvers.

Neither the F-16 pilot nor the traffic controller have been publicly identified. KEYWORDS: F-16 MILITARY PLANE

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu