Unanswered questions and grief follow crash of helicopters

NELLIS AIR FORCE BASE, Nev. - Air crews in trouble behind enemy lines sometimes have only one hope of survival: the 66th Rescue Squadron.

The elite group - whose motto is "These things we do so that others may live" - is trained to slip under radar and plow through sandstorms and fierce weather to bring downed crews home alive.

On Saturday, however, investigators picked through the wreckage of two helicopters, trying to determine why that very training cost 12 lives. Crews also were recovering the last of the bodies, base spokesman Mike Estrada said.

Investigators were unsure whether the two HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopters collided in midair before they crashed into the rugged mountain range in Nevada on a stormy Thursday night.

"I just can't imagine what went wrong, and they haven't told me anything about the crash," said Noelle Brunelle, whose husband, Kevin, was one of four flight engineers killed. "I think they're afraid to speculate and then be wrong."

The wreckage of the $10 million helicopters was spotted among the sagebrush about 2 a.m. Friday in a remote, restricted valley inhabited only by rattlesnakes, coyotes and unexploded bombs left behind by decades of aerial war games over the 5,200-square-mile site.

Air Force closeup photos showed pieces scattered across the side of a hill. It appeared there had been a fire, Estrada said.

"I didn't see anything that looked anything like a helicopter," he said.

Estrada said the accident, the worst in Nellis history, left everyone on the base on edge as they cope with long hours and strained emotions. A memorial service at the base was planned for Thursday.

Mrs. Brunelle, who works at the Nellis command center, was told to stay off work for awhile. The command center is coordinating the recovery efforts.

"The rescue community is a close-knit group," she said Saturday as she curled under a blanket on the couch of her Las Vegas home.

"I've gotten calls from around the world from people who were so upset they couldn't even talk," she added.

"You don't meet people like him very often," she said of her husband. "I got five good years out of it. We never fought. He was a really good guy."

With her were Pete Gehrag, her husband's best friend and a fellow squadron member, and his wife, Ashley.

Gehrag said the accident will not change his involvement with the 66th but he planned to contact a lawyer as soon as possible to make out a will.

Capt. Lee Bloom, whose husband was a pilot on the doomed flight, works in the base public relations office. She was in the office as news of the disaster trickled in.

Her birthday was Friday, and her husband, Capt. Karl Youngblood, had delayed a planned flight to Iceland in order to celebrate with her, Estrada said.

The dead also included Airman 1st Class Justin Wotasik, a para-rescueman. He joined the Air Force when he was 17 and moved to Nellis in January, said his mother, Julie, from her home in Palmdale, Calif.

"He loved his job," she said. "He was very talented. He was an Eagle Scout and on the varsity swim team in high school.

"He was to turn 20 next month."

The helicopters set out at 8:30 p.m. Thursday to practice survivor pickup routines. A search-and-rescue team was deployed after they missed their scheduled 12:30 a.m. return.

Estrada said the helicopter crews were supposed to have been using night-vision goggles, which amplify moonlight and starlight.

In recent decades, dozens of military helicopter crashes have been reported in which the pilots used night-vision goggles designed for ground troops, not flight use. That version had poor peripheral vision and didn't warn pilots of looming clouds that rendered them useless.

However, Estrada said the Nellis crews were using an upgraded version with greater power.

While investigators speculated that it could take five or six months to determine what happened, weather may have been a factor.

"The weather last night was horrendous ... It was like a hurricane out here," Patricia Pearlman, who lives 12 miles outside Indian Springs, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Friday.

The choppers went down 25 miles north of Indian Springs, a tiny community 33 miles northwest of Las Vegas that serves as an auxiliary field for Nellis. The site is about 25 miles southeast of Groom Lake - more commonly known as Area 51, a top-secret base that has been the testing site for such exotic aircraft as the F-117A Stealth fighter and the U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird spy planes.

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