The Battalion
Vol. 82 No. 197 CISPS 045360 6 pages College Station, Texas Wednesday, August 19, 1987
Pack Rat
Don Griffiths, a sophomore electrical engineering major, packs a par
achute after a skydive at the Aggies Over Texas Inc. skydiving center
Photo by Rodney Rather
at Coulter Field. Griffiths has been jumping from airborn airplanes
for about a year and has logged close to 70 jumps.
Investigators comb wreckage
for clues to jetliner’s fatal crash
FAA records show airplane
had earlier engine problems
ROMULUS, Mich. (AP) —Teams
of federal investigators crisscrossed
the scorched crash site of a North
west Airlines jetliner Tuesday, while
grieving families began the process
of identifying the bodies of up to
157 people killed in the crash.
One man marveled that his 4-
year-old granddaughter was the
lone passenger to survive Sunday’s
fiery tragedy, while relatives of other
passengers were warned that some
of the mutilated bodies might never
be identified.
“If you have a mass of body parts
and none of them have an identifia
ble item on them it’s going to be im
possible to identify,” said Inspector
Richard Stover of the Wayne County
Sheriffs Department’s emergency
management division.
No official death toll had been is
sued Tuesday, but unofficial tallies
placed it at 157.
That was 154 of 155 people on the
plane and at least three killed on the
ground.
A team of 100 investigators, in
cluding experts from the federal
government and the companies that
made the plane and engines, worked
at the crash site for the second day,
plotting the position of large pieces
of wreckage and bodies.
John Lauber, one of five members
of the National Transportation
Safety Board, refused to theorize
about the cause of the crash, saying
“we haven’t ruled out anything at
this point.”
The flaming plane skidded under
WASHINGTON (AP) — The ill-
fated Northwest Airlines jetliner
that crashed near Detroit was
plagued with engine problems on at
least three previous flights that
forced pilots to turn back, Federal
Aviation Administration records
show.
But in two of the incidents, involv
ing turbine blade failures, the prob
lem engines were replaced for repair
and likely were not involved in Sun
day’s crash that killed at least 154
people, the records indicate.
Investigators from the National
Transportation Safety Board, mean
while, began backing away from the
possibility that a catastrophic engine
failure caused the crash.
NTSB board member John
Lauber said there is no physicial evi
dence of an uncontained engine fail
ure, but a less-severe engine prob
lem has not been ruled out. An
uncontained failure means engine
parts break free of the engine’s
outer skin and potentially damage
critical parts of the plane such as the
control system.
In each of the three earlier inci-
three viaducts, two freeway over
passes, and a train trestle Sunday
night after taking off from Detroit
Metropolitan Airport on a flight to
dents, which occurred between No
vember, 1985 and last January, the
troubled engine was shut down and
the plane landed safely on the re
maining engine.
The plane, a twin-engine McDon
nell Douglas MD-80, was designed to
be able to fly on one engine.
The MD-80 that crashed seconds
after takeoff from Detroit Metropol
itan Airport was purchased in 1982
by Republic Airlines, which merged
with Northwest Airlines last year.
Records at the FAA’s Aeronau
tical Center in Oklahoma City show
a total of eight in-flight incidents in
volving the plane since 1984, includ
ing two engine turbine blade failures
in the Pratt 8c Whitney JT8D 200-se
ries engines and one incident involv
ing low engine oil pressure.
Other incidents reported to the
FAA included a blown tire and a
malfunctioning sensor on the main
landing gear.
Redmond Tyler, a spokesman for
Northwest Airlines, emphasized that
the previous engine problem likely
had no bearing on Sunday’s accident
because the engines involved in
those incidents had been replaced.
Phoenix, Ariz., and suburban Los
Angeles.
The lone survivor, Cecilia Cichan,
of Tempe, Ariz., was listed in critical
condition at an Ann Arbor hospital
with third-degree burns over 29 per
cent of her body. She was identified
by her grandfather, Anthony Ci
chan, of Maple Glen, Pa., who recog
nized her chipped tooth and purple
nail polish.
“Her mother shielded her, and
that is what saved her,” Cichan said.
Rescue workers found her under
what was believed to be her mother’s
body. The girl’s parents and 6-year-
old brother were killed in the crash.
Northwest, based in the Minneap
olis suburb of Eagan, Minn., flew in
the last of the victims’ relatives Tues
day and put them up in airport ho
tels, where they gathered together
and talked to clergymen while await
ing identification of the bodies.
“What we’re mainly doing is being
sensitive to what’s happening,” said
the Rev. Lowell Lawson, one of
about a half-dozen chaplains consol
ing the families. “We do a lot of lis
tening.”
A Northwest official, who de
clined to be identified, said the com
pany had brought in about 300 vic
tims’ relatives from the United States
and Canada.
Interstate 94, a major Detroit ar
tery, was closed after the crash and
the Michigan Department of Trans
portation said the freeway should be
closed for two to three days until the
crash site is surveyed and the debris
removed.
Police took six people into custody
Monday night for entering the crash
site.
U.S. journalist
gets freedom
out of Beirut
DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) —
American journalist Charles Glass
said he locked up his snoring Mos
lem kidnappers in a Beirut apart
ment before dawn on Tuesday and
escaped to freedom after two
months’ captivity.
Syrian troops, whose government
claimed a hand in Glass’ freedom,
whisked him from Beirut to Da!mas-
cus, the Syrian capital, where he was
handed over to U.S. Charge d’Af-
faires David Ranso.
Glass, 36, left Damascus in a char
tered jet for London at 8:48 p.m. to
be reunited with his wife, Fiona, and
five children, official sources at
Damascus airport reported. Report
ers were barred from the airport
when the plane, provided by the
American ABC television network,
took off.
“I feel good,” a beaming Glass
said when he was turned over to
Ransom by Syrian Foreign Minister
Farouk al-Sharaa. “The people who
really suffered were my wife and
children. All I want to do now is get
home, see my wife and children.”
The tall, dark-haired reporter,
originally from Los Angeles, looked
tired but in good shape after his 62-
day ordeal.
Hours earlier, he had fled from
the south Beirut neighborhood of
Bir el-Abed, a stronghold of pro-
Iranian Shiite Moslem militants.
Sharaa said the Syrians had a
hand in getting Glass out of captiv
ity, but he gave no details.
A Syrian source, who is closely
connected with the Syrian military
based in Lebanon, said Glass’ Shiite
Moslem kidnappers allowed him to
get away “so they would not appear
to have bowed to Syrian pressure”
to free the American.
The source spoke on condition of
anonymity and there was no inde
pendent confirmation of his version
of the escape.
However, presidential spokes
man Jibrane Kourieh told the Asso
ciated Press that Gen. Vernon Wal
ters, the United States’ special envoy
and U.N. ambassador, had tele
phoned President Hafez Assad “and
expressed his thanks and the thanks
of the U.S. administration as to the
Syrian effort to obtain the release of
journalist Charles Glass.”
Walters also “expressed his deep
gratitude and pleasure as to the re
sults obtained by Syrian diplomacy
in this field,” Kourieh said.
Glass said he had escaped by his
own devices.
Glass, on leave of absence from
ABC to research a book on Leb
anon, was kidnapped June 17 with
Ali Osseiran, son of Lebanon’s de
fense minister, and his bodyguard-
driver by 14 gunmen in south Bei
rut.
Captors release
former student
held as hostage
From Staff and Wire Reports
HOUSTON (AP) — A former
Texas A&M student held hostage
for more than three months by rebel
forces in Mozambique was freed
Tuesday morning, aides of U.S.
Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Sugarland,
said.
Kindra Bryan, a Houston nurse
kidnapped by RENAMO rebels
along with six other people May 13
from a rural missionary clinic in Mo
zambique, was in the custody of the
U.S. State Department after being
freed Tuesday, the aides said.
The aides said the rebel forces
walked Bryan across the border be
tween Mozambique and Malawi
Tuesday morning. But Bryan’s
mother, Mary Jo Free, said the State
Department told her a Christian
group may be responsible for Bry
an’s release.
Free also said she spoke with
Bryan briefly by telephone.
“She says she’s fine,” Free said in a
telephone interview from her home
in Wellborn. “She said they’d been
walking about 12 hours a day the last
few weeks. Altogether they’d walked
about 300 miles.
“She said she hadn’t brushed her
teeth for three months. She sounded
pretty good but the connection
wasn’t very good.”
Free said the State Department
told her just last week that the re
lease of her daughter in the near fu
ture wasn’t promising.
“We were a little discouraged,”
she said. “We felt it might be a whi
le.”
Bryan graduated from Bryan
High School in 1978 and attended
Texas A&M for two years before
transferring to the University of
Texas Medical Branch in Galveston,
where she graduated with honors in
1983.
RENAMO rebels had earlier den
ied that the seven were kidnapped,
saying instead that the guerrillas
evacuated the group to safety from
an area of heavy fighting.
The rebels also had said she was
captured in order to keep the Mo
zambique government from abduct
ing her and blaming it on the rebels.
Health officials set to conduct first human trials
Scientists announce possible AIDS vaccine
WASHINGTON (AP) — In what
they called a first step on the long
road to a vaccine to prevent AIDS,
health officials announced Tuesday
the first human trials in this country
of such an experimental vaccine.
Scientists said they have begun so
liciting the 81 volunteers who will
take part in the test, which will run
from six months to a year, and that
the first subject could be vaccinated
as early as next month.
The prototype vaccine, made by
MicroGeneSys Inc., a drug and bi
ological products firm in West Ha
ven, Conn., is the first of several sim
ilar candidate agents to win approval
from the Food and Drug Adminis
tration for clinical trials.
The tests, which will be conducted
at the National Institutes of Health
Clinical Center in Bethesda, Md.,
are designed solely to determine the
safety of the potential vaccine and
whether it raises any kind of im
mune response against the virus that
causes AIDS, officials said.
The question of whether the pre
paration, derived from an inert pro
tein from the virus which causes
AIDS, will prevent people from get
ting the disease will be addressed in
future studies, said Dr. Anthony S.
Fauci, director of the NIH unit
sponsoring the trial.
Vaccines made from inactive pro
teins of the virus are safe for volun
teers and it is impossible for such a
preparation to give anyone AIDS, he
added.
Fauci told a briefing that the first
test will involve 81 healthy volun
teers, including 75 homosexual men,
who are not infected with the virus
that causes acquired immune defi
ciency syndrome.
Homosexual males are one of the
groups at highest risk of contracting
AIDS, and Fauci said they would be
asked to volunteer because homo
sexuals eventually will be prime can
didates for a vaccine if one is devel
oped.
The volunteers, who must agree
to follow safe sexual practices and
other AIDS-avoidance behavior dur
ing the trial, will get various doses of
the vaccine, and some will get
booster injections later, scientists
said. Some of the participants will be
in control groups and get injections
of another type of protein.
Of the six heterosexuals in the
trial, three will get a maximum dose
of the vaccine and three will receive
the control protein, they added.
“This is the first step in what will
be a long process toward developing
a vaccine to prevent AIDS,” Fauci
said in an interview. “It will be a con
siderable rime, probably the mid-
1990s, before any vaccine, including
this one, will be ready for general
use.”
AIDS is a contagious and incur
able disease that attacks the body’s
immune system, rendering it incapa
ble of resisting other diseases and in
fections.
The condition is believed caused
by an unusual virus, called human
immunodeficiency virus or HIV,
that is spread through contact with
blood and semen from infected per
sons. Its chief victims so far have
been homosexual men and intrave
nous drug users.
As of Aug. 10, AIDS had been di
agnosed in 40,051 Americans, of
whom more than half, or 23,165,
have died since 1979, according to
the federal Centers for Disease Con
trol. No one is known to have recov
ered from AIDS.
“Although education is a power
ful public health tool for limiting
transmission of AIDS, in order to
halt the global AIDS epidemic we
must have an effective vaccine,” said
Robert E. Windom, the assistant
Health and Human Services secre
tary for health, in a statement about
the human tests.
Windom oversees the Food and
Drug Administration, which ap
proved the testing, and the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases, the NIH unit which will
oversee the trials.
Franklin Volvovitz, president of
MicroGeneSys, said scientists at his
privately held company have eight
potential AIDS vaccines in various
stages of development and plan to
be involved in other human tests.
MicroGeneSys scientists reported
immunizing hundreds of animals,
including mice, guinea pigs, mon
keys and two chimpanzees, with the
prototype vaccine to be used in the
trial and that all responded with
good antibody levels.
When the antibodies were tested
in laboratory cultures, they neutral
ized the strain of the AIDS virus
used to make the vaccine, research
ers reported.
British say
Hess killed
himself in jail
BERLIN (AP) — Rudolf Hess,
the last member of Adolf Hitler’s
inner circle, apparently strangled
himself with a length of electical
cord after nearly half a century in
prison, British officials said Tues
day.
Hess died Monday in a British
military hospital in West Berlin at
the age of 93. He had been in
prison since a bizarre “peace
flight” to Britain in 1941 and, for
21 years, the sole inmate of caver
nous Spandau near the hospital.
Eugene K. Bird, once the top
American officer guarding Span
dau, told the Associated Press the
one-time Nazi deputy fuhrer
tried to commit suicide on four
other occasions.
Hermann Goering, com
mander of the Luftwaffe and one
of Hitler’s closest confidants, poi
soned himself after the Nurem
berg war crimes trials in 1946,
two hours before he was to be ex
ecuted.
Soldiers of the four World War
II allies took turns guarding Hess
for a month each, and Americans
were on duty during August.
“It will be a considerable time, probably the mid-1990s,
before any (AIDS) vaccine, including this one, will be
ready for general use. ”
— Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, National Institutes of Health
director