Officials look for answers in fatal copter crash in Germany
MANNHEIM, Germany — The UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter and its crew of three had just a few miles to go Wednesday to reach the heliport at Coleman Barracks, but it was dark, rainy and visibility was poor. They never made it.
On Thursday, Army officials meticulously began the process of trying to piece together why the crew and its copter fell about six miles shy of its destination. All three soldiers died when the helicopter went down in a heavily wooded area. No one on the ground was hurt.
“Any loss of a soldier hurts the entire Army family,” said Maj. Daniel J. Meyers, a U.S. Army Europe spokesman. “The loss of three soldiers at the same time hurts that much more.”
Meyers, who was at the scene Thursday, would not identify the soldiers until the Army completed its family notification process. He also would not disclose the unit, although the 1st Battalion, 214th Aviation Regiment, a Black Hawk unit, is based in Mannheim. Vehicles sporting the unit’s designation were at the scene Thursday.
The aircraft crashed after 6 p.m. in a forested area east of Coleman Barracks, within earshot of autobahn 67. Meyers told reporters Thursday that the helicopter went down at about 6:45 p.m., though a German firefighter who responded to the crash said the first group of firefighters left the station for the site at 6:19 p.m.
Meyers said the crew was on a “routine training mission” at the time of the accident. He did not immediately know where the helicopter was coming from when it went down.
“There are many different factors” that can cause a helicopter to crash, Meyers said. “We need to find out why.”
He would not speculate on what might have caused the crash. Maintenance records for the downed helicopter have been secured and could not be released to the public, Army officials said.
The Black Hawk is a mainstay of the U.S. Army, an aerial workhorse used to shuttle people, supplies and equipment in peace as well as in war. Probably just about every soldier and Marine in uniform has, at one time or another, stepped aboard a UH-60.
At the time of the crash, it was raining and visibility below the clouds was no more than one mile, according to a German weather service spokesman. He estimated the cloud ceiling to be 1,000 feet and said temperatures were in the mid-30s.
About 70 firefighters from two nearby German villages responded to the accident. They were assisted by the U.S. military. One German firefighter from Lampertheim said in a phone interview that the helicopter was destroyed.
Scores of U.S. and German servicemembers worked the crash site Thursday, some sticking small flags by pieces of debris that will be further inspected by a team of Army investigators en route Thursday from Alabama.
The forest was fairly dense with icy patches of snow and ice, though a lot of it had melted in the past couple of days, exposing autumn leaves, along with twigs and branches of various sizes.
The dull hum of cars and trucks driving along the nearby autobahn could be heard through the trees.
While the Army was waiting for the investigation team to arrive from the States, there were Army technical experts on the scene.
Meyers approached one of them, a lieutenant colonel, asking if he might have time to briefly speak to the press. He declined.
“When your friend dies and you have to go and investigate it (the crash), it hurts,” Meyers said.
“We feel very sad and sorry about what happened,” said German army Col. Bernd Bauer, who has oversight over all German forces in Hessen.
When asked to characterize the debris field, Bauer somberly said, “It’s dispersed, little pieces, not much bigger than ...” and with that he held up his hands.
They were a little more than a foot apart.
Marcus Klöckner and Mark Patton contributed to this story.
