Fiery crash at Hanscom Field leaves 7 dead
The scene of the Hanscom Field plane crash (David L. Ryan/Globe Staff).
What's with all the wreckage?
"After Hanscom crash, a hunt for answers; Routine takeoff at Hanscom ends in explosion, deaths of all 7 aboard" by Dan Adams, Jeremy C. Fox and Martin Finucane | Globe Correspondents and Globe Staff June 01, 2014
BEDFORD — Investigators Sunday were trying to determine why a private jet attempting a routine takeoff at Hanscom Field instead ran off the end of the runway, crashing into a wooded gully and exploding in flames Saturday night, killing all seven people on board.
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The victims included Lewis Katz, co-owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and three other passengers returning to New Jersey after attending a nonprofit fund-raiser at the Concord home of historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and her husband, Richard Goodwin, a former presidential adviser.
The three additional passengers were Anne Leeds, a retired preschool teacher from Longport, N.J., friends said Sunday; Marcella Dalsey, executive director of the Drew A. Katz Foundation; and Susan K. Asbell, who served with Dalsey on the strategic planning committee of the Boys & Girls Club of Camden County, N.J.
Three crew members, yet to be identified, also perished in the fiery crash. Removal of seven bodies from inside the jet was completed Sunday evening, according to an official briefed on the investigation.
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A ball of fire exploded in the night sky and an acrid odor similar to that of burning tires could be smelled as far away as Cambridge and Boston late Saturday. Cambridge police fielded “numerous” calls about the smell of smoke shortly after the crash, said Jeremy Warnick, a department spokesman. In Boston, residents called the city’s Fire Department “almost nonstop” between 11:15 and 11:45 p.m. Saturday, department spokesman Steve MacDonald said.
NTSB officials Sunday emphasized that the investigation of the crash was at its “very beginning,” and it was too early to draw conclusions about the cause. Officials were proceeding on the idea that the crash was an accident of some sort, although nothing had been ruled out.
The Gulfstream IV crashed into a gully in a wooded area, about 2,000 feet past the end of Hanscom Field’s Runway 11, apparently without lifting off or signaling distress to air traffic controllers, according to Luke Schiada, senior air safety investigator at the National Transportation Safety Board’s Office of Aviation Safety. The crash occurred about 9:40 p.m. Saturday.
In a news conference Sunday, Schiada said the plane left the runway and continued rolling through grass, colliding with an antenna and bursting through a chain-link fence before coming to rest in the gully.
An airport employee told investigators the aircraft never took flight, Schiada said.
The fire was fuel-driven, a law enforcement official briefed on the crash said, and mostly produced smoke rather than flames.
Schiada said the plane was fragmented and “most of it is consumed by fire.” Debris along its path included pieces of landing gear, Schiada said, and some parts probably landed in the water at the bottom of the gully.
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Greg Raiff, founder and chief executive of Private Jet Services Group in Seabrook, N.H., said he has years of experience flying Gulfstream jets, and called the Gulfstream IV “one of the finest civilian corporate aircraft ever designed.”
Based on eyewitness accounts, Raiff speculated that the pilots may have discovered a fire after beginning takeoff and then properly attempted to stop and evacuate the plane, but were caught in the sudden explosion.
“I think this is going to point toward a maintenance issue rather than a pilot error or operator issue,” he said. “That’s my gut.”
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Katz, 72, was a philanthropist and businessman who once owned the New Jersey Nets and who made a fortune in parking lots, banking, and real estate before becoming a newspaper mogul as co-owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Daily News, and Philly.com.
Were there stories he was going to pursue or publish that certain people may not have liked?
Katz traveled to the Bay State Saturday with Leeds, Dalsey, and Asbell to attend an event supporting the Concord River Institute, a nonprofit educational organization founded by Michael Goodwin, the son of Doris Kearns Goodwin and Richard Goodwin.
The Goodwin family issued a statement in which the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and biographer of Abraham Lincoln and the Kennedys praised Katz’s commitment to education.
“Lew Katz was my cherished friend of nearly 20 years,” Doris Kearns Goodwin said. “He was a force of nature.”
Leeds was a proud grandmother, devoted churchgoer at the Holy Trinity Parish of Margate City, N.J., and the wife of Longport, N.J., Commissioner James P. Leeds Sr., friend Regina Tepedino told the Globe.
Dalsey was executive director of the Drew A. Katz Foundation, and president of KATZ Academy Charter School, which she cofounded with Lewis Katz in 2012, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
Asbell was a mother of two and was married to Samuel Asbell, a former Camden County, N.J., prosecutor, the Inquirer reported.
L.G. Hanscom Field was built in the 1940s on land in Bedford, Concord, Lexington, and Lincoln, according to Massport, and operates as both a public airport and a resource for the adjacent Hanscom Air Force Base.
The airport was closed after the crash and remained closed until about 7 p.m. Sunday, when one of its two runways was reopened to traffic, according to Matthew Brelis, a spokesman for Massport, which operates the airport.
Ed Freni, aviation director for Massport, said that the crash occurred near a stream, but that environmental officials had been notified and the Clean Harbors cleanup company was at the scene. He said residents should not be concerned about contamination of their drinking water.
Really?
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About that water:
"Crews determining extent of jet fuel spill into Shawsheen River" by Kathy McCabe | Globe Staff June 02, 2014
Jet fuel spilled into the Shawsheen River after a plane crashed, killing seven people Saturday at Hanscom Field in Bedford and triggering an emergency cleanup of the waterway.
Crews spent Sunday working to determine the extent of the spill and its impact on the 25-mile river that flows through seven cities and towns northwest of Boston. The amount of spilled fuel was unknown Sunday, officials said.
I was told just above.... arrrrrgggghh!!!!!
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Massachusetts Port Authority, which operates Hanscom, contacted Clean Harbors, Inc., a Norwell-based firm that provides emergency environmental cleanup services, to respond to the scene....
The town does not draw water from the Shawsheen, but officials shut down a nearby wellfield, a source of its public water supply, about an hour after the crash.
“We did it strictly as a precaution,” Bedford Town Manager Richard Reed said during a telephone interview Sunday. “We don’t believe our water supply has been affected.”
Still, the shutdown prompted one resident to be concerned.
“I went out and bought bottled water. I’d rather err on the side of caution,” said Kristine Sacco, 35, a mother of four young daughters who lives on Saran Avenue. “I’m normally the kind of person who drinks town water.”
Reed said the wellfield will remain shut down until the plane's wreckage is removed. He said the town will continue working with Clean Harbors to monitor water quality, and any residual foam used by firefighters to douse the blaze.
“We’ll do more testing [of water] when we get to the point that they remove the aircraft,” he said.
A leader of the Shawsheen River Watershed Association said the fuel spill poses one of the first threats to the river in at least 15 years.
“This is the first time I’ve known of an accident that has any potential impact,” said Suzanne Robert, of Andover, president of the volunteer advocacy group. “If they had the correct emergency response, they could have cut off the spread [of fuel] very quickly. But if they didn’t, it could move quickly upstream. It’s all such an unfortunate occurrence.”
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"Hanscom tragedy followed a celebratory evening" by Eric Moskowitz | Globe Staff June 01, 2014
CONCORD — Lewis Katz became a towering figure in business and philanthropy, co-owning two professional sports teams and a major newspaper company and donating tens of millions of dollars. But friends say he never forgot what it was like to be raised by a widowed mother in blue-collar Camden, N.J.
They described Katz, 72, who died with three friends and three crew members in a crash at Hanscom Field Saturday night, as a man without pretense. Just before getting in a private jet that would whisk him to Concord for an education fund-raiser, he stopped by his local diner on the Jersey Shore, a hole-in-the-wall with vinyl seats.
When the waitress misheard his order — bringing raisin bread instead of raisin bran — Katz cheerfully ordered another slice and left a $20 tip. That was typical, said friend Joseph DiLorenzo, who dined with him in the seaside hamlet of Longport, N.J.
“His effort and time was never spent on negativity,” said DiLorenzo, who was struggling with the news of his friend’s death during what was supposed to be a quick trip to the Boston area. “It’s hard to grasp, because it’s so raw.”
Katz — a household name in Philadelphia as an owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper and the largest donor in Temple University’s history — did not limit his giving to Philly and neighboring Camden.
In Longport, a town of 1,000 year-round residents that swells to 4,000 people in the summer, “he was so generous that you were almost afraid to tell him what the town needs, because if they needed a fire engine, he’d have two fire engines delivered tomorrow,” DiLorenzo said.
Katz seemed to adopt a more-the-merrier approach with friends. When he bumped into a neighbor, Anne Leeds, just before leaving for the Massachusetts fund-raiser, he invited her to come along, DiLorenzo said. Katz’s group flew to Hanscom for the launch party for a national education program started by the son of Doris Kearns Goodwin, the historian who has written about several presidents.
Katz had also invited close friend Ed Rendell, the former Pennsylvania governor, but Rendell declined because of a speaking engagement, the Inquirer reported.
After the last of the other 200 guests emptied out of the tent in Goodwin’s Concord yard, Katz and the three friends he brought — Leeds, Susan Asbell, and Marcella Dalsey — stayed for dinner with the Goodwins Saturday evening before returning to their waiting Gulfstream IV. All were killed, along with the as-yet-unidentified crew, when the plane crashed on takeoff.
“Lew Katz was my cherished friend of nearly 20 years. He was a force of nature,” Goodwin said in a statement, noting that they talked Saturday night about their “shared passions for sports and journalism, politics and history. But the last thing he said to me upon leaving for the plane was that most of all what we shared was our love and pride for our children.”
Goodwin and her husband, Richard, an adviser to Democratic presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, hosted the party. It was a celebration, fund-raiser, and launch for the Concord River Institute, an organization to train teachers, administrators, and students to replicate an interdisciplinary program their son, Michael, developed while teaching at Concord-Carlisle High School.
“Our hearts and prayers go out to the seven people who lost their lives in this horrible tragedy, and to their families and loved ones,” said Michael Goodwin, who founded the institute after creating Rivers and Revolutions, a school-within-a-school, at Concord-Carlisle. “The death of Lewis and his colleagues is a crushing and devastating loss.”
Asbell, a childhood friend who was in her late 60s, joined Katz in contributing time and money to the Boys & Girls Club of Camden County and was active in the Jewish community of South Jersey, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Asbell — the wife of a former county prosecutor — was “passionate about the Club and the children in her hometown of Camden,” said Bernadette Shanahan, executive director of the Boys & Girls Club.
“There are simply no words to describe the depth of our sorrow and loss,” Shanahan said by e-mail.
Leeds, a 74-year-old grandmother and retired preschool teacher, was a next-door neighbor to Katz in Longport and the wife of a Longport commissioner, similar to a selectman.
Dalsey, a 59-year-old mother of four from Haddonfield, N.J., served as executive director of the Drew A. Katz Foundation — named for Katz’s son — and president of KATZ Academy Charter School in Camden, which she cofounded with the family, according to the foundation.
Inquirer editor Bill Marimow said Katz brought youthful enthusiasm and commitment to community to his ownership stake in the parent company of the Inquirer, Philly.com, and the Philadelphia Daily News. Just last week, Katz and a partner prevailed after a multiyear struggle to buy out other partners for control of the company.
“It’s such a shame, because he was just starting to really bear the fruits of his labors,” Marimow said Sunday. “He was an incredibly warm, generous, and gregarious person. He treated everyone — whether it was a maintenance person, a receptionist, a person making a turkey sandwich for him at the deli, or the chairman of the board of a Fortune 500 company — with equal measures of dignity and warmth.”
Katz believed in the power of good journalism and was prepared to invest in it, emphasizing a strategy to unite the strengths of the Philadelphia papers and Philly.com, said Stan Wischnowski, the Inquirer’s executive editor, calling Katz’s death “very difficult.”
Maybe it was just an accident, but I don't know. I no longer trust that explanation when it comes to plane crashes.
“He was very engaged about the future, and he did not mince words regarding the challenges we are facing,” Wischnowski said, recounting their last conversation Friday. “He was saying all the right things, that you’ll have all the resources you need.”
Drew Katz, who will replace his father on the media company’s board, issued a statement calling his father his teacher, mentor, and best friend.
Like Katz, Leeds was known for her dry wit, easy warmth, and devotion to grandchildren, friends said. She was a well-read woman who drew laughs with situational humor while running raffles and raising money for the local Holy Trinity Parish, said Regina Tepedino, a fellow parish trustee.
“The whole parish is shocked,” she said.
Mike Cohen, a former Longport mayor and the town’s resident historian, called Leeds nurturing. Like Katz, he said, she was “good people.”
“Mrs. Leeds knows everybody, talks to everybody. Any time we need something or if we have a party at City Hall, she’s involved serving and taking care of people,” he said. “The whole community is a little upset today, very sad.”
Dalsey, who went by Marcy and ran the Katz foundation, spent three decades working to improve education and aid the less fortunate; she also opened an ice cream parlor in Haddonfield. John Quinesso, who taught two of Dalsey’s sons and one of her two daughters in elementary school, called her a dynamic, energetic woman with a social conscience.
“She had a great personality and just a lot of shine to her,” he said. “Just a humanist.”
Lewis Katz, whose father died when he was an infant and whose mother raised him on a secretary’s salary, worked in his early 20s as “leg man” for legendary Washington columnist Drew Pearson, doing Pearson’s behind-the-scenes reporting, Marimow said. Katz won the job after driving Pearson from the train station to a speaking engagement at Temple.
Though Katz left journalism for law school, he kept his passion for it as his career in law, banking, and business flourished. He developed a parking-lot and billboard empire and became owner for a time of the New Jersey Nets basketball team and New Jersey Devils hockey team while also holding a stake in the Yankees Entertainment and Sports Network.
Katz remained lifelong friends with his schoolmates from Camden and Temple, including college classmate Bill Cosby, who encouraged Katz to join the university’s board in the 1990s. He would contribute $25 million alone to its medical school. Katz also gave $15 million to Penn State’s Dickinson School of Law, his legal alma mater.
“Life in my view is meant to be enjoyed,” Katz told Temple graduates last month, when he received an honorary doctorate. “It’s meant to have as much fun as you can conjure up.”
Boston Red Sox outfielder Shane Victorino, who grew close to the Katz family during his time with the Philadelphia Phillies, tweeted a picture of himself with Lewis and Drew Katz. “Love you like a dad! You taught me the value of helping others and giving back!” Victorino wrote. “Numb right now.”
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"Data recorders found in rubble of Hanscom crash; Investigators hope devices yield clues; members of flight crew ID’d" by Brian MacQuarrie and Travis Andersen | Globe Staff June 02, 2014
BEDFORD — Investigators on Monday recovered the flight-data and cockpit-voice recorders from the private jet that hurtled off the runway at Hanscom Field two nights earlier, critical pieces of evidence that could show why the Gulfstream IV failed to take off and shattered in a fiery crash that killed seven people.
Why were we never told about them on 9/11?
The discovery was announced by the National Transportation Safety Board shortly after 6 p.m., following a day in which more than a dozen investigators scoured the charred remains of the private jet in a steep, narrow gully about 600 yards beyond the runway. A crane had been brought to the site to help uncover the recorders.
While the cause of the crash remained uncertain Monday, pieces of information about the flight’s final seconds emerged. No hydraulic fluid was found on the runway, ruling out a leak of such fluid as a cause. And authorities said there was no evidence of a delay in takeoff.
Monday also brought identification of the doomed jet’s flight crew....
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"Pilots may have tried to stop plane before Hanscom crash; Recorder shows mechanisms were used before crash" by Travis Andersen and Martin Finucane | Globe staff June 03, 2014
BEDFORD — The Gulfstream IV jet that crashed at Hanscom Field Saturday night, killing seven people, reached a speed of 190 miles per hour before slowing down during its attempted takeoff and hurtling into a gully, air crash investigators said Tuesday.
The story has already changed, huh?
Hmmmm!
Information from the plane’s flight data recorder indicated that the jet’s thrust reversers had been turned on and that brake pressures were rising, Luke Schiada, the lead investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, said at the scene.
The scenario described by the investigator suggested that the pilots were trying to abort the takeoff, one veteran pilot said. Thrust reversers are typically used to slow planes down by diverting jet exhaust to the front, rather than the back, as in normal operation.
“The thrust reversers deployed and the wheel brake pressures rose as the airplane decelerated,” Schiada said. “We’re also observing tire marks on the runway.”
That would seem to indicate evidence of a delay in takeoff.
Schiada declined to say outright that the pilots were trying to stop the plane, saying: “We’re not interpreting the information that the thrust reversers were deployed. . . . I don’t want to interpret what the actions are.”
He also did not give any indication as to why the crew might have been trying to stop the plane.
“We’re not going to speculate,” Schiada said.
However....
The Globe will.
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"Gulfstream IVs have few blemishes on safety record; Hanscom takeoff crash is second fatal one" by Laura Crimaldi | Globe Staff June 03, 2014
The Gulfstream IV, the type of business jet that crashed Saturday while attempting to take off from Hanscom Field, has an excellent reputation for safety, having crashed during takeoff only one other time since the aircraft’s debut in 1987, according to experts and federal safety records.
Uh-oh.
“They are very well-built airplanes,” R. John Hansman, a professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Monday in a phone interview.
They are for important people.
Investigators are trying to determine why the plane left the runway, struck an antenna, and burst through a chain-link fence before sliding into a gully, killing all seven people aboard. An airport employee told investigators the aircraft never took flight, a National Transportation Safety Board official said.
Possible sabotage?
Aviation experts told the Globe that investigators would probably examine whether the pilot tried to abort takeoff and encountered a problem, such as a blown tire or brake failure, that prevented the aircraft from stopping while still on the runway.
There would have been evidence in plain sight on the runway. There was none.
“This is a very unusual accident,” said Bruce Landsberg, president of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association Foundation in Frederick, Md.....
:-(
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NEXT DAY UPDATE:
Private jets drive demand at Hanscom
Failed lift-off a key in plane crash inquiry
So who killed Lew Katz, and why?
Related:
"Plane search focused on wrong area, officials say" by David Fickling | Bloomberg News May 30, 2014
SYDNEY — A deep-sea hunt for the missing Malaysian passenger jet has focused on the wrong place for nearly two months, officials said Thursday, after a survey of a remote stretch of the Indian Ocean found no trace of wreckage.
Meaning SOMETHING was being CLEANED and COVERED UP!
The shoot down theory is looking better all the time!
A zone where acoustic pings like those emitted by aircraft black boxes were detected in early April ‘‘can now be discounted as the final resting place of MH370,’’ Australia’s Joint Agency Coordination Centre said. The undersea survey using robot submarines will resume over a wider 23,000-square-mile area in August.
The announcement is the latest setback in what is already the longest search mission of the passenger-jet era. Investigators have scoured waters from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean without finding a fragment of the Boeing 777-200, which disappeared on March 8 with 239 people on board.
‘‘It’s a pretty straightforward case of trying to find a needle in a very big haystack,’’ Peter Marosszeky, a lecturer in aviation at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, said by phone Thursday. ‘‘To locate anything on the sea floor is always very difficult.’’
BULL.
Investigators have scoured a 850-square-kilometer stretch of the ocean floor since April 14 using side-scan sonar, after an underwater microphone picked up four signals like those emitted by aircraft black boxes on April 5 and April 8.
The sonar technology, used to locate the lost Air France 447 aircraft off the coast of Brazil, can pick out objects smaller than a meter.
‘‘The audible signal sounds to me just like an emergency locator beacon,’’ the agency’s chief Angus Houston told a media conference April 7 announcing the detection of the first two pings.
That was whale song!
That survey was called off without success Wednesday, and investigators will now use ship-based sonar to assemble a more accurate map of the seabed before resuming the hunt, the agency said.
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You can do your own search to try and find that plane in my Globes.
Time for me to get a ticket and fly the hell away from this post.
"First ticketed flight, a $10 trip, is marked" Associated Press June 03, 2014
DOHA, Qatar — The aviation industry is marking 100 years since the first scheduled commercial flight took off, making a 23-minute journey across Florida’s Tampa Bay.
A round-trip ticket on the Jan. 1, 1914, flight from St. Petersburg to Tampa was priced at $10.
Abe Pheil, then mayor of St. Petersburg, bid $400 to be the first passenger on the two-seat plane as part of an effort to raise money for two harbor channel lights for the city, which are still in use.
The International Air Transport Association is marking the 100th anniversary of that flight at its annual conference in Doha....
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"Industry seeks better tracking of planes" by Aya Batrawy | Associated Press June 03, 2014
DOHA, Qatar — An organization representing airlines worldwide will offer a list of recommendations in September to improve the tracking of aircraft after the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the group’s director said Monday.
Tony Tyler made the comments at the annual meeting of the International Air Transport Association, three months after the disappearance of the Malaysian plane with 239 people aboard....
The hunt for Flight 370 has turned up no confirmed sign of the Boeing 777, which vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Authorities believe the plane turned sharply and flew to the southern Indian Ocean. Not a piece of it has been found....
They were looking in the wrong place, meaning something was being covered up.
The industry is looking at methods to continuously track aircraft in ways that do not require a constant stream of data, which may not be manageable for tens of thousands of planes each day.
Tyler said the draft of recommendations will be presented to the UN International Civil Aviation Organization in September and followed up by the IATA in December.
‘‘We need to take a global mind-set to problems like this because we don’t want to be in a position where one government or regulatory body requires us to do it one way in one place and we have to do it a different way in a different place,’’ he said.
Did you understand that double talk?
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UPDATE: After long wait, Malaysia releases jet data
While the 45 pages of information may help satisfy a desire for more transparency in a much criticized investigation, specialists say it’s unlikely to solve the mystery of Flight 370 or give much comfort to relatives stuck between grieving and the faintest hope, no matter how unlikely, their loved ones might still be alive.
I was told ‘‘it’s a whole lot of stuff that is not very important to know.’’
Also see:
Search ends for Lake Michigan boaters
Two people rescued after boat capsizes off Plum Island
NEXT DAY UPDATE: Logan Airport fire drill spreads on social media
