747 Crashes on Guam; 219 Die

AGANA, Guam —  A Korean Air jumbo jet carrying 254 people, many of them tourists and Korean honeymooners, vanished from radar like a ghost and crashed today on a jungle-covered hillside just short of the Guam airport in a fireball that pierced the darkness and an early morning rain with flashes of bright red and orange.

Authorities said 35 people survived the crash. The plane was Flight 801, a Boeing 747, en route from Seoul to Agana. Thirteen passengers held U.S. passports. One was from Hacienda Heights and two from the San Diego area. In addition, relatives said an 8-year-old girl from Glendale was on the plane. It was not known whether they lived.

U.S. Navy crews, carrying flashlights, used backhoes to crack open pieces of the fuselage and then pulled people out. They included a woman and a 6-year-old child. Carl T.C. Gutierrez, the governor of Guam, reportedly rescued four or five survivors, including a young Japanese girl who begged him to go back inside the wreckage and find her mother.

But Gutierrez could not fight his way through the fire and smoke. He and his wife visited the girl at Guam Memorial Hospital, and the governor’s wife stayed with her while he returned to the crash site. Gutierrez reportedly also pulled a flight attendant from the wreckage. She was badly injured, and reports said she died shortly afterward.

The crash was the second involving a Boeing 747 in little more than a year. The first was TWA Flight 800, nine miles off Long Island, N.Y., on July 17, 1996. Investigators said a fuel tank exploded in the belly of the TWA plane. They think a spark ignited vapor inside the tank, but they are not certain what caused the spark. They have not been able to rule out a bomb or a missile as the cause of the explosion.

The National Transportation Safety Board sent 18 investigators to Guam, a U.S. territory 1,600 miles east of Manila. They were headed by Greg Feith, who led the probe into the crash of a McDonnell Douglas DC-9 ValuJet last year in Florida, caused by an on-board fire. The Korean Air cockpit voice and flight data recorders were found in the wreckage. The investigators were expected to send them to Washington for analysis.

Flight 801 departed Seoul filled with summertime travelers and South Korean honeymooners who choose Guam as a popular destination because it is only four hours away and offers travel packages that cost only about $100 more than a trip to Cheju Island, a scenic spit of land at the tip of the Korean peninsula.

The plane felt its way through darkness, fog and a light rain toward the airport at Agana. The glide slope component of the airport navigation system--the Instrument Landing System (ILS)--was out of service, according to NTSB Chairman Jim Hall. This meant that pilot Park Yong Chul had to control his descent manually, using on-board instruments to determine his position.

Three Miles From Runway

At 1:50 a.m., Guam time, Flight 801 disappeared from radar screens in the airport control tower, and flight controllers lost radio contact.

The plane was three miles from the end of Runway 6 Left, the Federal Aviation Administration said.

Rudy DeLos-Santos, an announcer and news reporter, awakened for his early shift at radio station KOKU. He heard a plane flying close overhead.

His apartment is less than four miles from the airport, and he was “used to hearing the noise of airplanes.” But this one did not sound right. “There was a rumble,” he said. “My whole apartment started to vibrate. It seemed at first like an earthquake.”

He stepped onto a balcony and looked up into the light rain. Not more than 150 yards from his apartment was “the giant silhouette” of a jetliner. In the darkness, he could not make out the carrier or type of aircraft. All he could see was its great belly.

“It came down, and the belly skimmed the trees, and then a big ball of red-orange fire erupted under the plane,” DeLos-Santos said. “It just dived into the ground and skidded for maybe a minute through the jungle.”

When he looked up, DeLos-Santos said, he could see no sign of landing gear. He said the plane was flying level, “as if it was coming in for a landing.”

DeLos-Santos rushed to the crash site, nearly 1,000 yards from his home, in rugged terrain known as Nimitz Hill, a popular area for nature hikes. Aircraft debris was burning like “a bonfire,” he said. It lit the still forms of victims, thrown like scarecrows around the wreckage.

“What I’ll never forget is the smell--burning jet fuel and burning flesh,” he said. “I had to step away to breathe fresh air. So did the rescue workers. It was unbearable.”

The plane skidded into a ravine filled with dense vegetation, more jungle vines and low brush than trees. The area was covered with razor-sharp saw grass, some if it eight feet tall. An occasional coconut tree stood sentinel over the tragedy.

The plane plowed through the vegetation like a great tractor, DeLos-Santos said. The front of the aircraft survived largely intact, he said, and this was where rescuers found most of the survivors. He said the aft part of the fuselage was shattered by the impact.

“It looks,” DeLos-Santos said, “like someone took a hammer to an eggshell.”

Gov. Gutierrez was among the first to arrive at the crash, his representative, Ginger Cruz, told CNN. A report on MSNBC said the governor pulled three survivors from the wreckage, including the 11-year-old Japanese girl and the injured flight attendant.

Tyrone Taitano, a spokesman for Guam Memorial Hospital, told MSNBC that Gutierrez and his wife, Geraldine, came to the hospital to ask about the Japanese youngster. “The governor did have a special interest in the girl,” Taitano said.

Taitano told the The Times in a telephone interview that the survivors suffered injuries ranging from facial cuts and bruises on the Japanese girl to broken bones and burns requiring surgery.

“Actually, we have a mass casualty plan that provides for taking care of this kind of disaster,” he said. “We had a drill for such an emergency earlier this year. Our procedures were fairly well in place.”

At a news conference, broadcast on Guam radio, Gov. Gutierrez and Dr. Mike Lanser, one of the first physicians at the crash site, told of the dramatic rescue of a woman and a 6-year-old girl who were pounding on the inside of a portion of the fuselage.

The woman apparently suffered a crushed pelvis but the girl reportedly was unharmed.

Another radio report told of a pilot from New Zealand who rode as a passenger in Row 19 and simply got up out of his seat and walked away from the crash.

The report said five other people walked away from the wreckage. It said some were in a daze.

Capt. David Wheeler, administrator at the U.S. Naval Hospital on Guam, said his facility received 19 casualties. One died, he said. “The only thing I have seen like this was in Vietnam,” Wheeler said. The crash caused “mass casualties, and my troops rose to the occasion, and we handled it smartly.”

Three of the injured were in critical condition, Wheeler said, and two were very serious. He said the rest were in serious condition, suffering burns, smoke inhalation, lacerations, bruises and broken bones.

Wheeler said his hospital normally had 55 beds, but officials brought in 40 more to accomodate the additional patients.

Saw Grass May Have Cushioned Impact

If the plane had crashed a mile farther north, it could have caused “massive death on the ground,” said Ray Gibson, the program director for radio station KOKU. “It would have gone into neighborhoods, into homes instead of hills and grass.”

Gibson said the saw grass, which he called sword grass “because it cuts you in bad places,” might have cushioned the impact of the crash.

Two Navy CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters, with pilots wearing night-vision goggles, ferried the survivors to medical help.

They landed in the ravine containing the wreckage, then took off through clouds of white smoke as flames flickered in the grass and the debris below them.

On the ground, it took rescuers four hours to reach the plane.

U.S. military personnel carved a jungle path for them to follow. They used backhoes and bulldozers. “It’s a very difficult trek for the rescuers,” Cmdr. Kevin Wensing, a spokesman for the U.S. Pacific Fleet, told Reuters.

The crash site was a mile or so from the nearest road and near a pipeline carrying aviation fuel from the Naval Station Guam to Andersen Air Force Base.

Part of the wreckage snagged the pipeline, causing it to rupture and spill about 1,000 gallons of the fuel. But Navy Lt. Cmdr. Jeff Alderson told the Associated Press that the fuel did not catch fire because the break occurred far enough away from where the wreckage finally careened to a stop.

Of the 13 passengers holding U.S. passports, Korean Air listed these Californians:

* Wendy Bunten, no age given, from the San Diego area.

* Sean Burke, no age given, from the San Diego area.

* Ben Hsu, 15, of Hacienda Heights.

The airline said others with U.S. passports were from Atlanta and Guam.

In addition, relatives said that Tiffany Kang, 8, of Glendale, was aboard the plane, along with 11 members of her family from South Korea.

Tiffany had gone to South Korea to visit her family, the relatives said, and they had taken her to Guam on vacation.

In Los Angeles, Charles J. Kim, the executive director of the Korean American Coalition, a civil rights group, said he hoped that no terrorism was involved in the crash. “If there is any evidence that North Korea was involved,” he declared, “it will never be forgiven.”

Some Relatives Upon Notification

Korean Air officials at the Seoul airport began the task of notifying relatives of the victims. Some collapsed when they were told that their loved ones were on Flight 801. The AP reported that one airline official ran away when a woman with a relative on the plane tried to hit him.

Some of the relatives demanded that Korean Air fly them directly to Guam.

South Korean President Kim Young Sam issued a statement saying: “I can’t suppress the oveflowing sorrow.”

In Seattle, Brian Ames, a spokesman for Boeing, said the aircraft manufacturer was standing by to dispatch a team of investigators of its own.

“Their role would be to support the National Transportation Safety Board,” Ames said. “The NTSB has the lead on the investigation.”

Ames identified the plane as a 747-300, the 605th airplane delivered off the Boeing assembly line to Korea Air in December 1984. The plane had 49,799 flight-hours and 8,433 cycles, or takeoffs and landings, he said.

He said the numbers were “typical of an airplane that age.”

No information was available on maintenance of the aircraft, Ames said.

The plane was capable of carrying 400 people in a three-class configuration. It flew with a crew of 23.

Doug Webb, another Boeing spokesperson, declined to speculate about possible causes of the crash. “It’s just too soon to tell,” he said.

Flight 801 ordinarily lands at Guam and then returns to Seoul as Flight 802.

A small island, Guam is the westernmost possession of the United States.

Its population is 150,000. Guam is 4,000 miles west of Honolulu and 2,200 miles southeast of Seoul.

Roughly one-third of Guam’s 212 square miles is taken up by U.S. military bases.

In another crash involving the airline, 269 people were killed in 1983 when Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down by a Soviet fighter plane after the jetliner strayed into Soviet air space.

The company dropped “lines” from its name after the plane was shot down.

Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Chi Jung Nam in Seoul, Robert L. Jackson and Dina Bass in Washington and Eric Malnic, William C. Rempel, Connie Kang, John L. Mitchell, Larry Gordon, Bart Everett and Richard E. Meyer in Los Angeles.