As search and recovery is nearly completed, one key question looms over efforts at the site of a July 10 KC-130T military plane crash in western Leflore County: What happened to the plane?
Military investigators are withholding any speculation about the cause and continuing the methodical process of gathering and cataloguing every piece of the plane that could be found across a 5-mile debris field spanning U.S. 82.
County Emergency Management Coordinator Fred Randle said that the manual combing of agricultural fields, patches of woods and ponds in the area is near completion and that the Marine Corps’ investigation into the cause of the crash will continue in Leflore County.
“Reconstruction will begin next,” Randle said. “They’ll piece it back together and try to figure out what happened.”
In the meantime, no shortage of theories have circulated, based on eyewitness accounts of what the plane looked like as it fell from the sky.
Farmer Donald Fulgham, on whose land parts of the plane fell on the north side of U.S. 82, said he saw the plane as it was coming down.
“Part of the front was missing,” Fulgham said. “Part of the nose was off the plane, and a couple of the engines were missing.
“The only kind of plane I’ve ever been around was a crop duster, and it was kind of a surprise to see a plane like that.”
Another description of the falling plane that has been widely reported in national media came from Andy Jones, identified as a member of a catfish farming family in the county.
Jones said he heard a boom at around 4 p.m. and looked up to see the plane spiraling downward with one engine smoking.
“You looked up and saw the plane twirling around,” Jones’ account said. “It was spinning down.”
Bill Henderson of Cotton Belt Aviation, headquartered at Greenwood-Leflore Airport, said everything regarding the cause of the plane crash is pure speculation, including his own ideas, until the investigation reveals what happened.
“I didn’t see it, so any idea I have about it is just a theory,” Henderson said.
Nonetheless, the pilot whose Navy career included extensive experience with the Lockheed P-3 — a four-engine turboprop work horse similar to all C-130s, including the one that crashed — said that based on a description he heard, he has developed an idea of what occurred.
“One guy said he saw the cockpit sheared off,” Henderson said. “A plane hardly ever breaks up in the air like that.”
Some accounts said pieces of the plane were falling off as it plunged from the sky, and the crash site includes two major sites of impact — one large piece of the plane on the north side of the highway and another, miles away, on the south side.
Henderson said he thinks a “runaway propeller” caused by engine overspeed might be the cause.
“If the engine overspeeds in one of these planes, then you go to a pitch lock,” he said. “There’s a pitch lock on those planes for a reason.”
A pitch lock functions as a corrective device that limits propeller overspeed by mechanically preventing decrease in the angle of the propeller blade. If it fails, Henderson said, “the propeller is going to tear the engine out of the airplane.”
Henderson speculates the Number 3 engine, the one closest to the fuselage on the right side of the plane, might have been the one affected in this case.
“If it came loose, it’d go right into the cockpit,” he said.
The propeller assembly on these massive planes weighs “a couple thousand pounds,” Henderson said. “They’re about 10 feet wide. It’s like a big old circular saw.”
The KC-130T that crashed apparently never communicated a mayday or distress call to air traffic controllers. That leads Henderson to believe an engine overspeed failure that couldn’t be corrected caused the destruction of the plane before it landed.
The military’s fleet of P-3s and variations of C-130s, all made by Lockheed, now Lockheed-Martin, have been around and in use for many years, all the way back to the Vietnam War.
“This one could have been a good 20, 30, 40 years old,” Henderson said.
They also have an exemplary safety record.
But at least one account of the July 10 crash, from the Marine Corps Times, indicates that the Marine Corps has struggled in recent years to maintain aircraft readiness.
The July 10 crash in Leflore County, which killed all 16 men aboard, was the deadliest Marine aviation disaster since 2005 when a large troop-carrying helicopter crashed in Iraq. Thirty Marines and one sailor died in that crash.
In January 2016, two Marine planes collided in mid-air over Hawaii, killing 12 Marines.
The Marine Corps Times report said the most recent crash “comes at a time of intense concern about the readiness and condition of the Corps’ aviation fleet.”
Last week, the Marine Reserve grounded its fleet of 12 KC-130Ts while investigation into the cause of the crash continues.
“While the cause of Monday’s crash has yet to be determined,” the Marine Corps Times story said, “in the past decade the Marine Corps has struggled mightily to maintain aircraft readiness in the face of austere budgets and an at-time crushing operational tempo.”
Operational tempo refers to the number of aircraft ready to fly on any given day, a number that has declined precipitously in the past seven years, according to the story.
On the ground in Leflore County, Marine investigators have overseen the meticulous recovery of evidence that they hope will lead them to a conclusion about what happened.
“When the military brought me a model of what the plane looked like, it had a lot of things missing,” Fulgham said.
“I could tell from what they showed me what it was supposed to look like. I said, ‘Lord, have mercy.’ It’s just one of them freak things.”
• Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com.
