DATE: Friday, October 17, 1997              TAG: 9710170587

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA 

SOURCE: BY JAMES HANNAH, ASSOCIATED PRESS 

DATELINE: FAIRBORN, OHIO                    LENGTH:   53 lines

CHERRY POINT MARINE JET GOES DOWN IN OHIO; PILOT SURVIVES

A North Carolina military jet crashed Thursday near a busy interstate highway intersection. The pilot ejected safely, and no one on the ground was injured.

The AV-8B Harrier on a training mission went down about 2 p.m. in a cornfield just 50 feet from Interstate 675, near the intersection with Interstate 70 in western Ohio. The plane was not carrying any weapons.

The jet was assigned to Marine Attack Squadron 542 at Marine Corps Air Station at Cherry Point, N.C., the base said.

A witness said he saw flames coming from the jet's engine moments before it crashed about two miles northeast of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

The plane was one of four Harriers that had just taken off from Wright-Patterson, said Staff Sgt. Kristine Wilbanks, a spokeswoman from Cherry Point. Details of the training were not available. The cause of the crash was being investigated, she said.

Much of the plane disintegrated, and the only part intact was the tail section, which ended up perpendicular to the ground.

The pilot, Capt. Stephen E. Brooks, 30, of Washington, Pa., landed in a nearby field. He suffered scrapes and bruises and was taken to the base hospital.

Col. Bob Glisson, a wing commander from Wright-Patterson, said one of the other fighter pilots had spotted flames coming from the jet's engine.

``You're on fire. You're on fire,'' he said the pilot told Brooks.

Paul Cronley, 39, of Springfield, said he saw the flames as he drove along I-70.

``I thought to myself, `that's not right,' '' Cronley said.

The planes appeared to be searching for a safe place to land.

He saw the pilot of the burning plane eject before the plane ``took a nose dive, and then I just saw a huge fireball in a cornfield.''

He ran to help.

``It was total smoke,'' Cronley said. ``It looked like London fog everywhere.''

Cronley said the pilot ``did a heck of a job finding a safe area to land.''

The crash site is between Dayton and Springfield in western Ohio in an area populated by farms and housing developments and crisscrossed by several busy interstates.

Designed by the British more than 10 years ago, the $70 million, single-engine Harrier carries one person and can take off and land vertically. One was shown in the movie ``True Lies.''

About 20 of the jets have crashed in the last four years, and Harriers were temporarily grounded after one crashed in Twentynine Palms, Calif., last October. That pilot ejected safely. A Harrier also had crashed in Arizona two weeks earlier, and that pilot was killed. KEYWORDS: ACCIDENT PLANE ACCIDENT MILITARY

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