Wednesday March 28 6:11 PM ET
Wreckage of Second F-15 Found
Audio/Video
Snowstorm Hampers Efforts to Recover Possible Wreckage from Missing F-15 Jets - (WKMG, Orlando)
http://us.news2.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/... [not image]
The body of a missing U.S. Air Force pilot is carried to an unmarked van after its arrival at Aberdeen airport, Scotland Tuesday March 27, 2001. Search teams found a body and wreckage of an F-15 jet near a mountaintop in the Scottish Highlands where two U.S. fighter planes disappeared the Royal Air Force said Tuesday.(AP Photo/Newsline Scotland, Derek Ironside)
By AUDREY WOODS, Associated Press Writer
LONDON (AP) - Rescuers working in blinding snow found wreckage of a second missing American F-15 fighter jet on Wednesday in the Scottish Highlands, the U.S. Air Force said.
The search for the pilot was suspended as darkness and the weather closed in, and the operation was to resume at dawn.
The plane's tailpiece was found near Ben Macdhui in the Cairngorm mountains, where the first of the missing single-seat planes and the body of Lt. Col. Kenneth J. Hyvonen Jr., 40, were found Tuesday.
Searchers on Wednesday found the tailpiece of the second plane about 400 yards from the first wreckage site, said a spokesman for the Royal Air Force, which has been conducting air and ground searches in heavy snow.
The tailpiece was identified by its serial number.
The two aircraft vanished 45 minutes after taking off at midday Monday from Lakenheath air base, 75 miles northeast of London.
The U.S. Air Force at Lakenheath identified Hyvonen, of Michigan, as the pilot found dead. The missing man is Capt. Kirk Jones.
British and American military helicopters and search planes, plus police, air force and civilian rescue teams, have been searching by land and air in thick cloud and snow.
Royal Air Force searchers and the Braemar Mountain Rescue Team have been concentrating on an area to the north and east of 4,300-foot Ben Macdhui.
Avalanche risk made the search perilous, the Royal Air Force said Wednesday.
``Apart from cold and driving snow, we are facing the hidden danger of sudden avalanches. We are having to keep an absolute watch on the snow every second,'' said flight Sgt. Al Sylvester, leader of the RAF's mountain rescue team. ``The search itself in the snow is extremely hard but the avalanche danger is making it all but impossible.''
The Air Force said Hyvonen, commissioned in 1984, was assistant director of operations of 48th Operations Support Squadron.
The Air Force did not release Jones' home state, but the Arizona Republic newspaper reported that he graduated from Arizona State University.
Chad Steel, an Arizona State senior who met Jones and his wife at the Lakenheath air base in July, told the paper ``everyone (in the squadron) seemed to love him.''
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010328/wl/military_crashes_28.html[Edited by Serge Pod, 29-03-2001]