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Show Korean Survives Jet Crash Which Raised Havoc at Beryl And he walked away! After ripping out a telegraph line and power lines with the tail assembly of his jet trainer, careening through the roof of a Union Pacific bunkhouse an1 crashing into the ground another 200 feet beyond, 1st. It. Choaan Lee, Korean pilot training at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., walked walk-ed away. Eye witness observers, four section men, the section foreman, and the manager of the general store at Beryl, and his wife, where the accident occurred, expressed belief be-lief that the pilot at the point of impact with the ground ejected his seat from the jet air-, craft and threw himself clear of the plane. The seat and Lt. Lee landed another 200 feet beyond the point of the first impact and he rolled another 40 feet before coming to rest just beyond the mangled plane. Out of Fuel Lost and out of fuel, the pilot located the isolated Beryl and circled about three times with his jot engine cutting out periodically, periodical-ly, before he attempted a landing land-ing on the Utah Highway 98 just a few yards west of the Beryl Junction. Attempting a pass at the road going in a southerly direction, the pilot indicated he was trying try-ing to establish a wind direction. He rose with his plane again, turned and then came down for what the eye witnesses expected to be an emergency landing on the hiehwav froing north. Clayton Bracken, a road patrol! operator, expressed his belief that the pilot after touching down on the highway on an attempted at-tempted belly landing, saw the patrol, Bracken and another worker just 200 feet in front of him. The pilot then attempted to take his plane back in to the air. As he did he turned the jet aircraft to the west and headed directly for the telegraph poles and the bunkhouse. Passes Under Wires The plane went under the wires except for the tail assembly. The tail caught the wires, snapped them and then careened across the tracks, still In the air and the wing tip caught the mid-section of the bunkhouse. The plane continued for another an-other 200 fee before it first hit the ground. It was at this point jthat Tom Anzalone, section foreman, fore-man, who was watching the ac-'t ac-'t ion from the , side, thought that the pilot ejected his seat and threw himself clear of the plane. As the plane came through the bunkhouse roof, three of the section sec-tion crew were standing on the I west side of the building and the I aircraft passed directly over their .heads at an altitude of approximately approxi-mately 10 feet. A brick, dislodged from the house struck one of the U P employees, Whitney Jones. "Where Am I?" Jones was the first man to reach Lt. Lee and he asked the pilot, "Are you hurt?" The Korean's Ko-rean's answer was "No, get me !to a telephone." The next thing that the pilot said was, "Where in Nevada am I?" the U P employees em-ployees then oriented the pilot on his location. A. K. Tucker, general store manager and postmaster at Beryl, took charge of the pilot. He telephoned tele-phoned to Nellis Air Force Base land then Tucker transported the 'pilot to Enterprise. About an hour after the pilot had been taken to, Enterprise, Tucker, assuming charge as a government gov-ernment office holder with the post office, brought the pilot back to the scene of the accident. Shortiy afterwards the pilot began be-gan to suffer from shock. Lt. Lee was taken by the Air Police from the Tucker residence at about 8 p. m. and brought to Cedar City where he received his first medical medi-cal examination, except for some action by Tucker. Tom Anzalone, section foreman, F 1 : ,v.f.-srAJ ' ' - ' ..Jj r O . j - ; . ? " i . . j - - ft- 4 :.. . .. ' v j r -m i J - - - - - ' Ejected seat of Lt. Lee is shown in its proximity to the : crashed airplane. Lt. Lee was thrown clear of the plane and he rolled on the ground in this seat for approximately 40 feet before he unstraped himself and walked away. f ' ,m""" .-' -r- r , V- - i A :' " , . " r-- ...1 . ; f i . ' ' j! : ) , - : ' i - , ; i 1 -- t Whitney Jones, UP employee, stands in location where three men were standing as the jet airplane crashed through roof of bunkhouse. Jones strikes a pose with brick that hit him as the debris was strewn over the group. Plane was practically within reaching distance of men as it shot above their heads. witnessed the crash from the side : and he indicated, although he was not positive, that he saw the pilot go through the air in his ejected set. He also stated that the plane when it touched down on the highway took debris from the dirt road and a sagebrush on the wing back into the air with the plane. The dust and debris de-bris were still falling from the plane when it hit the wires and the bunkhouse. Anzalone immed iately dispatched a message to the Salt Lake City U P dispatcher dispatch-er informing him of the accident. acci-dent. Wires to Calionte, Nev., were severed by the plane and the accident report was necessari- j ly routed through Salt Lake City. The plane was completely j mangled. The wing assembly was mangled and machine guns in the nose were curled like pretzels. pret-zels. When the jet came to rest about 400 foot from the bunkhouse, bunk-house, it had made a half turn and was upside down. Not only the wing assembly, but the tail piece, was torn away. Bits of the plane wore strewn from the telegraph line to the final resting place and the ejected eject-ed seat was sitting another 40 feet beyond the plane. The nose was completely mangled man-gled and the stick inside the cockpit was also bent and the instrument panel shattered. Cuts and bruises, and a state of shock was apparently all that i' .. V-"CTM" - ; ' t ... . - - . . - I " . - . ' - v'iew of crashed jet airplane shows how assembly was torn from bottom of the fuselage and the battered front end. Tail V. ; -,v;' . . r J" r- . - ; ' ' - " - -. , - ' - Gayle Simkins, Iron County Record employee, em-ployee, looks over wreckage of jet. This the pilot suffered. He was returned re-turned to Nellis Air Force Base assembly has also been flattened out and practically torn from the body of piano. is where Lt. Lee would have ended up if he had ridden his plane out. I Monday evening, leaving the Cedar Ce-dar City airport at approximate- ly 9:30 o'clock, after a medical I checkup. |