BURNING WRECKAGE from a mid-air collision between two German Air Force fighter jets fell close enough to Marathon's Indian Basin gas plant Friday to get the undivided attention of plant employees, who didn't need a soothsayer to tell them what kind of conflagration it would have caused had it hit the installation. At right, Ande Marbach points toward the Kincaid Ranch horse pasture, where she watched the planes' pilots parachute more or less safely to earth.

Collision Downs German Jets
In Controversial Training Zone

By J. Zane Walley
Paragon Foundation

(Editor's note: The crash outlined in the following story is bound to heighten the already significant controversy over low-level combat training in New Mexico and West Texas. Backers of the missions consider the area virtually uninhabited, and it probably appears that way to fighter jockeys flying several hundred miles an hour at altitudes low enough to raise dust. To the people who live and work there, however, it is most definitely inhabited, and they are not amused by the intrusions. Paragon Foundation, which Walley represents, is among the organizations opposed to the low-level flights, both the current format and the much more extensive missions the military is planning.)

CARLSBAD, N.M. — It was just yards away from being a major calamity when two German Air Force jets flying from Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, New Mexico collided about 15 Miles northwest of Carlsbad on Friday.

One of the burning Tornadoes passed so close to the Marathon Indian Basin gas processing plant that a worker shakily remarked, "We thought it was going to fall on the plant!"

Luckily, it did not, nor did it hit three oil and gas wells in its path. It came to rest on a rocky, barren hillside about one mile from the Kincaid Ranch. The second German Tornado splattered over a mesa between the Kincaid and H-Bar-Y-Ranch ranches.

The Chihuahua Desert, where both flaming planes fell, is far from being void of people and activity. The gas processing plant, which produces explosive vapors as a by-product, had about 30 employees on duty at the time. Pipeline construction workers and vehicles are constantly shuttling about. The land is profusely spider-webbed with surface gas and oil lines, and forested with storage tanks and gas wells. A few miles up Queen’s Highway in the Gaudalupe Mountains are camping grounds, a church youth retreat, and the popular tourist destination, Sitting Bull Falls.

The investigation into the crash has not begun. On Sunday, U.S. Air Force troops clad in black tee shirts, camouflage and carrying M-16 carbines guarded the crash sites. A temporary command post consisting of air-conditioned portable metal barracks, a motor home, and antenna arrays has been set up on a rise overlooking one crash site and within five minutes of the other crash area.

Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Colman, the onsite commander, said, "The investigation will be conducted by the German Air Force, not the USAF. The Germans are flying in a special crash investigation team and should be on the ground by Monday, September 27."

The colonel also said, "The Germans made this mess and they will have to pay to clean it up. We want to do everything possible to ensure that the crash site is environmentally clean. The titanium in the planes burned so hot that there is not much left to clean up. This crash doesn’t present much of an environmental hazard, but if a stealth (fighter) crashes, the hazard is severe."

All German aviators parachuted from the burning aircraft, were treated and released in Carlsbad and have refused to comment on the disaster.

The cause of the mid-air crash has not been determined. Colonel Colman commented that it was almost a head-on crash that ripped the wings from the from the planes, but an oilfield environmental clean-up contractor, Allen Hodges, stated to the people on the Kincaid Ranch that he saw the aircraft "playing side-by-side" before the mid-air wreck occurred.

Oilfield worker Russell McKibben said, "I heard an explosion and thought, 'What the hell is happening?' I turned and saw smoke coming out of the wings of one plane and they were both spiraling down."

The crash of these two planes brings the total to six crashes that the German Air Force has been involved in since they started flying from Holloman AFB. Similar catastrophes in Germany in which the Luftwaffe suffered a 36 percent crash rate for Republic F-84F Thunderstreaks, and an almost 30 percent loss of the Starfighter F-104F created pressure from its citizens to move most of its low-altitude training to Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico and Canada's Goose Bay air base in Labrador.

A spokesman for the Holloman AFB public affairs office was asked if the results of the crash investigation team would be made available to the public under the Freedom of Information Act, and if the Air Force could produce definite documentation showing the crash occurred in airspace that was authorized for military training. He did not provide answers to either question.