DATE: Saturday, September 20, 1997          TAG: 9709200335

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS 

DATELINE: ALZADA, MONT.                     LENGTH:   69 lines

AIR FORCE BOMBER CRASHES; 4 DEAD THE MILITARY AIR DISASTER IS THE SIXTH IN SEVEN DAYS.

An Air Force B-1 bomber on a training mission crashed in southeastern Montana on Friday, killing all four crew members, the Air Force said.

The crash occurred on the same day the Air Force announced that it would ground all training flights next Friday as part of a service-wide safety review resulting from a string of aviation accidents.

After word of the crash, Gen. Richard E. Hawley, commander of Air Combat Command at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, announced that the safety stand-down would be moved up to Monday.

Friday's accident was the sixth U.S. military crash in seven days.

``It was just a big, black mushroom cloud. It looked so black against the clear sky,'' Kaye Nelson said from the Valley Inn Bar & Cafe in Alzada.

The crash happened about midafternoon in the corner of southeast Montana, near the state line with Wyoming. The bomber was from Ellsworth Air Force Base, near Rapid City, S.D.

``All four crew members were killed in the crash,'' said Capt.

Gary Carruthers, a spokesman for the Air Force's Air Combat Command at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton.

Ranch worker James Albertson said he, too, saw smoke in an area familiar to residents as an Air Force training range.

``I suspected the black smoke was either one of those planes hitting the dirt or someone burning tires,'' he said.

Brian Parker was antelope hunting about a half mile from the crash site. He said the plane had been flying low and there was no indication of trouble.

``We saw the plane fly by,'' Parker said. ``It came around us and went behind the ridge, and then we saw smoke and never saw it come back out.''

The B-1B Lancer, the type flown by Ellsworth's 28th Bomb Wing, is a long-range, heavy bomber that entered Air Force service in 1985. It can carry up to 84 conventional 500-pound bombs, or an undisclosed number of nuclear weapons, and fly faster than 900 mph. It costs more than $200 million.

Defense Secretary William Cohen on Wednesday had ordered all the military services to halt training flights for one day during the coming week after five accidents involving military aircraft.

``This has been a terrible, tragic week for our Air Force,'' Hawley said at Langley. ``We need to determine why these incidents happened and how to prevent any more mishaps.''

Last Saturday, an Air Force C-141 transport plane flying from Namibia apparently collided with a German military plane off the coast of Africa, killing 31 people.

The next day, an Air Force F-117A stealth fighter flying at an air show near a Baltimore suburb crashed in a residential area after a piece of the plane broke off. The pilot ejected safely.

Also Sunday, a Navy F/A-18 crashed in Oman, killing the pilot.

On Monday, a Marine F/A-18D Hornet fighter jet crashed in North Carolina's Pamlico Sound during a practice bombing run, killing the two pilots, and two Air National Guard F-16s collided Tuesday off the coast of New Jersey; one crashed into the Atlantic, the other landed safely. The three pilots survived.

Before Friday's crash in Montana, the U.S. military actually had lost fewer aircraft in accidents this year - 54, with less than two weeks remaining in the government's fiscal year - than in any recent year. It lost 67 last year, 69 in 1995 and 86 in 1994, Pentagon statistics show. ILLUSTRATION: U.S. Air Force/File

This B-1B bomber is similar to the one that went down in Montana. KEYWORDS: ACCIDENT PLANE FATALITY MILITARY PLANES U.S.

AIR FORCE

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