DATE: Saturday, October 25, 1997            TAG: 9710250379

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A3   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY MATTHEW L. WALD, THE NEW YORK TIMES 

DATELINE: WASHINGTON                        LENGTH:   55 lines

OFF-COURSE PILOT TOOK HIS OWN LIFE, AIR FORCE EXPECTED TO ANNOUNCE

The Air Force will issue a report next week that concludes, largely by process of elimination, that the pilot who flew his A-10 Thunderbolt 800 miles off course on April 2 and crashed into a mountain in Colorado had made a sudden decision to commit suicide, a senior officer confirmed Friday evening.

The Air Force's conclusion was first reported Friday night by ABC News and NBC News.

The Air Force spent most of the summer searching around New York Mountain, near Vail, and have been looking into the background of the pilot, Capt. Craig Button, of Massapequa, N.Y.

``Most everything they looked at was inconclusive,'' said the officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the report has not yet been released. ``There was a determination that there was no pre-meditated suicide,'' said the officer, who added that there was no suicide note or effort by Button to put his affairs in order.

Investigators also reviewed telephone records, the officer said.

``There was no apparent medical problem with him, no pre-existing condition or something that went wrong, like hypoxia or heart failure, and no mechanical problems with the aircraft,'' he said.

``We do know that he had positive control of the aircraft and that he had made some passes at some airfields,'' the officer said. ``The best we can come up with is that he did commit suicide, but it was more unpremeditated or spontaneous.

``He was up there and decided to do it while he was up there.''

Button was 32 and had been an Air Force pilot for five years.

The report is scheduled to be issued by the Air Combat Command next week.

Button, who was stationed at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona, was the trailing pilot in a three-pilot training formation. He left the other two planes and flew for three hours in radio silence before the crash, investigators said. His A-10 did not carry a cockpit voice recorder or flight data recorder of the kind used in civilian planes.

The senior Air Force officer said that after the investigating officer had written his report, his superiors ``accepted the investigating officer's conclusions, but only reluctantly.''

``They have followed every rabbit hole, they have looked at all the things that needed to be looked at,'' he said. ``There's just nothing that points to anything.''

While the report provides an answer, however unsatisfying, on what happened to the aircraft and its pilot, a continuing question is the fate of four 500-pound bombs that it carried. Despite an extensive search, which covered the rough terrain with helicopters, foot patrols and ground-penetrating radar, they were not found with the wreckage. ILLUSTRATION: Capt. Craig Button's crash into a Colorado

mountainside was not premeditated, the Air Force has concluded. KEYWORDS: ACCIDENT PLANE ACCIDENT MILITARY

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