GZG News Fiction - air ambulance crash brings investigators

		Air Crash Brings Investigators From New London
			Wednesday, Feb 13, 2137

INN, Albion - Royal Aviation Administration investigators have been
dispatched
to inspect the burned wreckage of an air ambulance that crashed Saturday
on a
remote part of the continent.

Search crews found the wreckage yesterday and recovered the bodies of
all five
people who died in the crash - the pilot, co-pilot, two members of the
Royal
Search And Rescue Force, and a visiting member from the Hawai'ian Free
State
SAR. Autopsies will be performed to determine the exact cause of death.

An investigator with the Interstellar Transportation Safety Board and
two from
the Royal Aviation Administration met with search teams who recovered
the
bodies, said Viveka West of the Royal Aviation Administration. 

The investigators were able to hover in to near the crash site, which
was five
kilometers from the Ohlsonville settlement, West said.

The crashed killed pilot Elena Rood, 41, co-pilot Roger Howell, 37,
Royal SAR
medics Sir Adrian Petero, 52, and Stephen Parr, 32, and HFS SAR member
Akela
Hala-kahiki, 28. 

Hala-kahiki was the chief assistant to the HFS SAR. She was the third
person to
be involved with the cross-cultural training program between the New
Anglian
Confederation and the Hawai'ian Free State.

The combined SAR team was traveling New London to Ohlsonville in order
to
evacuate a 9-yr old patient when the air ambulance, a modified VT-40
Boxcar
VTOL, crashed in stormy weather.

The wreckage was spotted at 10:37am yesterday at the 3,600-foot
elevation level
of 4,500-foot tall Mt Elijah in a thick growth of bearwood trees just
north of
the settlement. The crash site was compact, with most of the VTOL
smashed into
pieces no larger than a few feet in length, according to Julie Goodbar,
one of
first people to find the crash site using small personal flyers.

"It looks as if they were coming in too low and smashed straight into
the side
of the mountain," Goodbar said.

About 14 people from the settlement worked at the site yesterday to
recover the
bodies, which were removed around 4pm and taken to the local medical
center.
Local search and rescue personnel were shuttled in by hovertrucks to
within a
hundred yards of the crash site and were forced to walk the rest of the
way.

The last confirmed radar contact was at 2:41am Saturday when the VTOL
passed
behind Mt Elijah. Air field authorities at the settlement said the VTOL
had
veered off the normal path for air traffic inbound from New London.
Those
flights usually arrive from the northeast at 7,600 feet, but the Boxcar
had
been coming in from almost due north flying at about 5,600 feet.

One possibility is that the pilot, who radioed to ask about any
thunderstorm
activity in the Olhsonville area, deviated from his course to circle
around Mt
Elijah after encountering bad weather.

Several trees at the crash site showed signs of being hit by the VTOL,
but the
tail remnant, the largest piece of debris intact, was the only bit of
wreckage
visible from the air, Goodbar said.

"It's so difficult to see from the air that's it's amazing we found the
wreckage at all," she said.

Kevin Ducca of the settlement's Royal Guards unit estimated that
searchers had
only a few hours, if not minutes, left to find the downed VTOL because
the
emergency beacon was about to die out.

Ducca was one of three Royal Guards members on board one of the SV-12
recon
VTOLs based at Ohlsonville who were involved in yesterday's search. The
Royal
Guards located the beacon at the same time as the Goodbar's SAR team.

"If not for the beacon we probably wouldn't have found it," he said. The
Boxcar
was reported missing at about 4:00am Saturday, and Ducca said the
electronics
locating transmitter signat was not detected until 55 hours later. He
said the
lifetime of the transmitter's battery is about 48 hours.

He said signals typically are strong enough to be picked up by the
satellite
system, but the Boxcar's beacon, which activated on impact, may have
been
damaged, because it's signal could only be detected within a half
kilometer
area.

Even after the signal was picked up, the Royal Guards had difficulty
finding
the VTOL. Ducca said the area where the air ambulance went down had
three
layers of tree and brush cover.

"We didn't see anything that even looked like a VTOL", Ducca said. "We
saw a
couple of pieces that looked about the size of this vidscreen, a couple
of
white pieces…but it was so think that the branches and leaves just kind
of
closed back over the wreck site."

Bad weather had prevented a search of the area until Monday.

Once the wreckage was spotted, a two-man crew from the settlement's SAR
landed
at a clearing nearby and hiked nearly half a kilometer through the
forest to
confirm it was the missing VTOL, said mayor of Ohlsonville Damo Samson.

As the recovery effort was underway, Armin Leyland, medical director for
Albion's Air Ambulance Service, spoke with reporters at the company's
headquarters, referring to the victims as "heroes." He also indicated
that this
was the first crash in the history of the company on this planet.

"These five individuals who have spent most of their adult lives saving
lives,
had to make the ultimate sacrifice," stated Leyland.

Rood was one of 15 pilots employed by Albion's Air Ambulance Service.
She had
been flying for eight years and had more than 10,000 hours of flight
time in,
said Leyland.

"She will be sorely missed," said Samson, a friend of the Rood family.

The 9-yr old boy who was to be ferried back to New London on the doomed
Boxcar
was flown back in another Air Ambulance Service VTOL on Monday evening.
He is
said to be in stable condition.