Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, March 19, 1990                   TAG: 9003192585
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B-1   EDITION: EVENING 
SOURCE: MARK MORRISON and TAMMY POOLE STAFF WRITERS
DATELINE: BEDFORD                                 LENGTH: Medium

PLANE CRASH KILLS 2/ POLICE SAY FOG PARTLY AT FAULT

The victims were identified as Kevin Calloway, 22, a senior at Liberty, and Duwayne Douglas Calloway, 29, of Inez, Ky., who was returning with his brother for a visit.

They had been the targets of a three-state search that began early Saturday and ended Sunday morning on national forest land on Sharp Top Mountain, just south of the Peaks of Otter Lodge.

State Trooper D.M. Beckner said the plane's wings were sheared from the fuselage, which remained intact after striking several small trees and crashing into a hollow.

Both bodies were still inside the plane when rescue workers arrived. The cause of death was probably mass trauma from the impact, Beckner said. He said there were no signs the brothers had tried to get out of the plane.

The Cessna four-seater left Big Sandy Regional Airport between Prestonsburg, Ky., and Paintsville, Ky., on Friday about 5:30 p.m. headed for Lynchburg Municipal Airport. The flight should have taken less than 2 1/2 hours.

Authorities said Kevin Calloway, who had been a pilot for just over a year and had logged only about 140 flight hours, left the small airport without filing a flight plan.

Without the plan, air traffic controllers in Lynchburg had no way of knowing he and his brother were expected there. When a flight plan is submitted, search efforts are started within 45 minutes after a plane is overdue.

The plane wasn't reported missing until early Saturday, when Kevin Calloway failed to show up for work at Virginia Aviation, an aircraft service company at the Lynchburg airport. Calloway had leased his plane from Virginia Aviation.

The Civil Air Patrol in Virginia, Kentucky and West Virginia began a search, but its efforts were hampered by the lack of a flight plan.

David Caudill, mission coordinator for the Civil Air Patrol in West Virginia, said CAP pilots tracked an emergency locator transmitter that was activated when the plane went down.

The wreckage was spotted early Sunday and rescue workers reached the site about 9:30 a.m. The bodies were taken to Carder-Tharp Funeral Home in Bedford.

Although the cause of the crash has not been determined, authorities speculated Sunday that the weather was a factor.

It was raining and foggy over Bedford County Friday night, and Beckner said Calloway may have been flying under the cloud cover to see where he was going.

Calloway flew primarily by sight and was not certified to fly on instruments under poor visibility conditions, Caudill said.

"It's not illegal, but it's not good judgment," he said. "The people we have to go look for are usually the people who have taken on Mother Nature and lost."

Calloway called a Kentucky flight station at about 1 p.m. Friday and was advised not to fly because of the weather. He didn't call for a weather update closer to his time of departure.

"But the thing that's frustrating about this one is that he got through the worst part of the trip" over the West Virginia mountains, Caudill said. "I'm not going to say he was in the clear, but he was so close. It's really tragic."

Judging from where the plane went down and other circumstances, Caudill believes Calloway may have flown above the cloud cover for much of the trip before he began his descent into Lynchburg.

"When he came down, he probably got going too fast and couldn't see what he hit; he clipped off a wing and in he went," Caudill said.

This is the second time a plane has crashed into Sharp Top Mountain, according to Gene Parker, a forest ranger for the Peaks of Otter district. In 1946, a B26 bomber crashed in the same hollow, killing several military personnel, he said.

Keywords:
FATALITY