Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

This account of an unusual plane crash appeared in the "Wichita Eagle," June 12, 2004:

WASHINGTON — On a foggy October evening in 2002 pilot Thomas Preziose took off in a small Cessna airplane from the Mobile, Ala., airport on a routine flight carrying Express Mail. Preziose, an experienced pilot, had made the flight to Montgomery dozens of times for a small freight company. He knew the aircraft so well that he was certified to give flight instruction in it. 

Six minutes into the flight Preziose urgently told air traffic controllers: "I needed to deviate, I needed to deviate, I needed to deviate, I needed..." 

The plane was later found in pieces in a swamp. Preziose was killed. 

Small-plane crashes usually don’t get much attention But as investigators pulled the pieces of the Cessna out of the swamp they found unusual evidence that led them to report that the aircraft had “collided in-flight with an unknown object at 3000 feet." Twenty months after the crash, however, the agency still has not found an object.

In an unusual action, the National Transportation Safety Board's Washington headquarters has taken over the investigation, which had been conducted by the agency’s Atlanta regional office.  The NTSB released an interim report Thursday that makes no mention of a possible in-flight collision. 

The NTSB now says that the initial report should not have suggested an in-flight collision.  "That sentence should not have been in the factual report” spokesman Ted Lopatkiewicz said. 

NTSB investigators have begun to focus on whether the pilot somehow lost control of the aircraft, sending it plummeting into the water.  The shift in view is causing some involved in the investigation to raise concerns that the agency is not placing enough emphasis on leads pointing to impact from an object, possibly a military drone. 

What has stumped investigators are 34 red marks found on the aircraft’s wreckage when it was pulled out of a shallow marsh at Big Bateau Bay, several miles from the Mobile airport. The red smudges and streaks were on pieces of the plane from the nose to the tail, both inside and outside the aircraft. Many were on the left side of the plane near the pilot’s door. The direction of streaks did not show a consistent pattern. 

Proponents of the in-flight collision theory say the red marks support their contention. But the NTSB now says those streaks could have come from inside the aircraft. “We have to look for the more obvious sources" first, Lopatkiewicz said. If no match is found, the agency will pursue other possible sources of the red marks, he said. 

Investigators say they plan to review a piece of the wreckage recovered last week. The plane’s third propeller blade was found buried in the mud near the crash site. It was folded in half with gouges and red marks on its face. 

Initial speculation centered on the possibility that the Cessna could have been hit by another aircraft, such as a plane that was not equipped with a transponder. Another early idea explored by the NTSB was that the red marks could have come from an unmanned aerial drone. Many such drones are painted bright red or orange. 

Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, more than 170 miles from Mobile, flies unmanned aerial drones and has had three drone accidents since 2001, according to military accident records and local media reports. No one was hurt in those incidents. 

An Air Force spokesman said that no drones were operating on the evening of Oct 23 and that the drones fly only in military airspace. 

The NTSB tested drone material supplied by the military and compared it with the red marks on the plane. It also tested other red items found at the wreckage site, such as red cargo bags. The tests did not yield a match.

"No way we could let that go...that we possibly had an unknown midair,” said John Clark, director of aviation safety at the NTSB "We can’t let it go at that unless we just know we had exhausted every avenue." 

Clark said the agency does not plan to test any more aerial drones for comparison with the red marks. First he wants to examine the possible sources on the plane.

The NTSB's final report blamed the crash on "the pilot's spatial disorientation," and that was that, as far as officialdom was concerned.  Others, particularly Preziose's family, were not convinced.  The mysterious crash has attracted a fair amount of attention online, with the most popular theory, naturally, being "slammed into a UFO."  While that is, to say the least, unlikely, the cause of the fatal accident seems destined to remain unknown.