P-2 havariet - preliminær rapport

Utah air tanker veered from spotter plane's path before crash

Foto via Curt Lewis

SALT LAKE CITY (Reuters) - An airplane tanker that crashed while dropping flame retardant on a Utah wildfire last week veered from the path of the spotter plane in front of it before slamming into a mountainside, a preliminary report on the accident said on Tuesday.

The deaths of the tanker's two-man crew -- pilot Todd Tompkins, 48, and co-pilot Ronnie Chambless, 40 -- marked the year's first fatalities among personnel fighting U.S. wildfires this year.

The privately owned Lockheed Martin P2V, flying under contract for the U.S. Forest Service, crashed June 3 on a forested mountain in the Hamlin Valley area of southwestern Utah while battling the so-called White Rock Fire.

A two-paragraph initial report on the crash posted on the website of the National Transportation Safety Board does not rule out mechanical failures or other possible causes for the accident.

It also does not indicate whether smoke from the blaze, which had burned from Nevada into Utah, caused visibility problems for the pilots. They were both from Boise, Idaho, worked for the Neptune Aviation company, based in Missoula, Montana, and had taken off that day from Cedar City, Utah.

"At this point we have not ruled out much of anything. We are just documenting what we know," NTSB spokesman Keith Holloway said.

The air tanker, designated Tanker 11, had taken off 32 minutes before the crash and was trailing a smaller lead plane over a fire-retardant drop zone in a valley just under a half-mile wide and 350 feet deep, the report said. A lead plane is used to guide air tankers in the suppression of wildfires.

The spotter aircraft dipped to an altitude of 150 feet above the valley floor and made a shallow right turn toward the final drop area, the report said.

"While making the right turn on to final (approach) behind the lead plane, Tanker 11 impacted rising terrain that was about 700 feet left of the lead airplane's flight path," the report stated.