By LON WAGNER AND AMY WATERS YARSINSKE, The Virginian-Pilot
© January 2, 2002
Nine months had passed since Iraq agreed to allow a visit to the wreckage of
Scott Speicher's F/A-18, though Baghdad had postponed it three times. A year had
gone by since Timothy Connolly urged his superiors at the Pentagon to secretly
dispatch a team to the desert.
Two years had passed since Qataris found Speicher's jet.
Only the night before in Baghdad, the International Committee of the Red
Cross had given the Iraqis the latitude and longitude of the crash site. But as
the team neared the wreckage, Bedouins stood along the sandy path and waved
their arms, directing the vehicles to the site.
The United States had sent investigators from the Army's Central
Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, including an anthropologist to help examine
human remains. Experts from the Navy's crash investigation unit in China Lake,
Calif., also went to the site, along with a medic, an explosive-disposal expert
and three linguists.
The ICRC sent four people. The Iraqis sent two people and ordered soldiers to
encircle the perimeter of the camp for protection.
The group had left the fertile flatlands and lakes surrounding Baghdad and,
just three hours later, stood on a moonlike surface. They were 1,000 feet above
sea level, in the desert. As far as they looked, all they could see was sand and
a few scattered clumps of grass, shrubs and vines.
Just to the north, trails radiated out from Bedouin camps.
Speicher's Hornet was right-side up. Big chunks of it, easily recognized
parts like its engines, lay in a circle no more than 60 feet wide.
Without moving one shovel of sand, military experts knew what that meant. The
jet had lost power, gone into a flat spin and dropped almost straight to the
desert floor.
Speicher's jet had not, as first thought, been blown to bits in the sky.
Investigators quickly noticed one other thing: The cockpit was missing.
Obviously, others had gotten to the crash site before the Americans.
Investigators started at the nose of the F/A-18 and roped off an area
to excavate. It looked to them like the wreckage had been searched by people who
knew what they were doing.
A pile of backfill, a mound of sand dug from somewhere else, had been heaped
near where the cockpit should have been. Popped rivets lay on the ground nearby.
The backfill, the experts thought, was less than a month old.
Components from the Hornet's computer had been removed, too.
As the work near the jet continued, other members of the team formed skirmish
lines, spreading out and walking slowly to look for other evidence.
Two thousand feet to the north, they spotted something man-made, a tall arch
sitting upright on a sandy knoll. They got closer and saw that it was the frame
of the canopy, the transparent shield that covers the cockpit. It looked like
Bedouins had stood it on end as a landmark.
To the south, they found one of the HARM missiles Speicher was to drop on the
first night of the Gulf War.
A couple of days later, Navy flight mishap investigator Bruce Trenholm got a
call on his radio. The other team members had found something a couple of miles
away and wanted him to look at it.
He drove north and found the group standing in a circle. One of the Iraqis
said a Bedouin boy had found a jumpsuit while herding his sheep.
They told Trenholm it was Speicher's flight suit. Trenholm could see that it
was a U.S. NOMEX suit, standard aviator coveralls resistant to fires up to
several hundred degrees. He also could see that it had faded from its usual
olive color to a more greenish yellow.
He'd have to investigate to make sure it was Speicher's.
Near the flight suit, they found a cluster of pilot survival items: pieces of
straps from a parachute, an inflatable raft, a 20 mm shell and pieces of an
anti-G suit that a pilot wears to lessen aerodynamic forces.
They found a signaling flare. Someone had tried to light both ends, one for
daytime and one for night. The pyrotechnics were still inside the night end,
which meant maybe it hadn't worked.
On the team's fourth day in the desert, Trenholm spotted a small item sitting
on a rock. Part of it had been sheared off when the jet hit the ground, but he
knew what it was: the data storage unit of a Hornet.
If the information could be recovered from it, the DSU could unveil a
minute-by-minute mechanical account of Speicher's last flight.
On their last day in the desert, the team anthropologist and others excavated
a rectangular rock pile near the canopy. They thought it might be a makeshift
grave.
They dug down several feet but found no remains.
The next day, Dec. 15, the team pulled out. Some of the most valuable
evidence would turn up in the weeks to come, as the DSU and the flight suit were
analyzed.
But during those five days, team members got a look at what Speicher would
have seen if he'd landed safely. Miles of sand in any direction, far from
anybody who could help him.
One other thought picked at Trenholm's brain. It was cold. Freezing.
This was December. Speicher was shot down in January.
If it was cold now, in a tent, with plenty of layers and thick sleeping bags,
Trenholm knew it would have been bone-cold for Speicher.
A few weeks later, Tony Albano got a message during a training flight
that Trenholm was trying to track him down.
Albano, Speicher's roommate on the carrier Saratoga during the war, by that
time was with a squadron in Meridian, Miss. Albano and Mark Fox, another
squadronmate from VFA-81, agreed to meet Trenholm at Florida's Cecil Field.
In Jacksonville, Trenholm explained that he had been on the International Red
Cross mission to the Iraqi desert, they had found a flight suit and he wanted
Albano to look at it and see if he thought it was Speicher's.
He told them about the Bedouin boy who said he found the suit and that most
of the Red Cross team members figured the Iraqis had planted it.
He told them that the legs were slit in the back, like an emergency worker or
doctor would cut a suit off someone who was face down. He told them he'd
estimated Speicher's height at 5 feet 11 inches, his weight at 168 pounds and
his flight suit size at 38 long. The suit was a 38 long.
Then Trenholm reached into a paper bag and pulled it out.
The last time Albano had seen that suit, Speicher was wearing it, and they
were slapping hands, wishing each other luck on their first wartime missions.
Now, here it was, found lying in the sand, coming out of a bag.
Albano saw that the suit was a little tattered, pockets were missing and the
patches were gone. He knew that pilots remove those patches to ``sanitize''
their flight suits before flying into enemy territory.
He looked at Trenholm.
``I'm positive that's his flight suit,'' Albano said.
Then Fox hopped into his car, went to his house and grabbed his old flight
suit. A circular patch of Velcro fastener on Speicher's right sleeve matched
Fox's ``Sunliners-Anytime-Anyplace'' patch. An oval of Velcro on the left sleeve
lined up perfectly with a patch that read, ``F/A-18 Hornet 1000 Hours.''
Trenholm then told Speicher's squadronmates about the condition of the jet,
and the canopy and the parachute straps and the life support gear.
Five years after that awful night, there seemed to be even fewer answers. And
the same old question.
``Oh God,'' Albano thought. ``Well, what happened to him?''
Soon after the team returned to the United States, a top official at
the Defense Department's POW/MIA office met with Sen. Robert Smith to tell him
what the group had found.
Smith, a New Hampshire Republican, was on the Senate Armed Services Committee
and had tracked the Speicher case since the Qataris found the wreckage in 1993.
Smith's own father was a naval aviator who was killed near the end of World War
II, two days before Smith's fourth birthday.
On Jan. 17, during his briefing with the POW/MIA official, Smith heard grave
news: The Red Cross team had found nothing to suggest Speicher could have
survived.
A few weeks later, the aircraft investigators, life support experts, aviation
engineers and anthropologists filed their reports. Their findings colored in a
fairly thorough picture of what had happened to Speicher during his final
mission.
That picture differed sharply from what Smith had been told.
On Feb. 15, an aircraft mishap investigator at the Navy's Safety Center in
Norfolk reported a time line of Speicher's last flight. The information had come
from the damaged memory unit the team recovered.
Speicher lifted the Hornet off the deck of the Saratoga at 1:36 a.m.
At 1:43 a.m., his jet recorded a code indicating a HARM launch computer
failure. One, two or all three of his missiles might have been inoperative.
Two hours later, nearing the target, the jet's computer recorded another
code: Speicher's ALR-67 radar warning receiver. The device would have detected
threats from air or land. It might have had a minor problem or a complete
failure. Speicher could have looked at another gauge to see how well the device
was working.
At 3:49, Speicher turned off the jet's autopilot.
Seventeen seconds later, something slammed into his Hornet so hard that it
lost power.
Engineers reported that the rocket motors that blast the canopy from the
aircraft had burned even marks on its frame. That signaled a good ejection. They
determined that the charred paint on the inside of the canopy, and the way the
outside had melted, meant that Speicher had been engulfed for about three
seconds in a 600- to 700-degree fire.
Speicher would have had second-degree burns on exposed skin, such as the back
of his neck. But because of survival vests, the NOMEX suit and his anti-G suit,
it would take a fire hotter than 700 degrees and longer than 10 seconds to cause
fatal burns.
One of the engineers wrote: ``This pilot was over enemy territory, in
extremis situation and sitting in the middle of a hot cockpit fire. Logic
dictates that the only way this pilot is getting rid of his canopy is by
ejecting.''
Trenholm's report picked up with the ejection.
He determined that the canopy's distance from the wreckage meant that when
Speicher pulled the ejection handle, it separated as it should have.
The flight suit, signal flare, life raft items and anti-G suit materials were
all in pretty good shape. If the ejection had failed, Trenholm knew, those
things probably would have burned until they were unrecognizable.
Up to that point, 58 air crew had ejected from F/A-18s. Six had been injured
fatally, and a majority were injured either from the jolt when the parachute
opened or from landing.
But most pilots who ejected lived.
Trenholm found out that China Lake, years earlier, had issued a warning about
the GQ 1000 Aeronautical Parachute that Speicher was using. Those parachutes
sometimes allowed pilots to fall too fast, causing landing injuries.
His report concluded that Speicher probably had been injured either when the
parachute opened or during his landing. Speicher's flight suit had some stains,
maybe blood, but not enough to suggest that he had serious injuries.
Smith had been told the team found no evidence that Speicher survived.
But no one had turned up any evidence he had died, either.
The convoy rolled out of Baghdad the morning of Dec. 10,
1995, and headed toward the crash site.
An investigator photographs
the F/A-18's starboard engine. Engineers concluded that both engines
were in relatively good shape and had no ''entrance or exit wounds''
indicating battle damage. Department of Defense file
photo.
A battered flight suit was recovered
in the Iraqi desert, and the size of the Velcro left on the suit matched the
patch, shown here, worn by members of Scott Speicher's squadron. Photo
by Steve Earley / The Virginian-Pilot.
Team members sift the sand beneath
the aircraft, hoping to find Speicher's remains. They're wearing face masks as
shields against boron fibers in the wreckage. Department of
Defense file photo.