2 Crash Victims Still in Critical Condition

By CRAIG D REBER

While University of Du-buque faculty, staff and students sought solace in a prayer service Thursday for two students critically burned in an airplane crash, federal aviation investigators probed the Cassville, Wis., site.Juniors Cory Alsip, of Glendale Heights, Ill., and Grant Vogt, of Dubuque, students in UD’s aviation program, remained in critical condition at the University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics in Madison.The Socata Trinidad TB 20, manufactured in 1997, went down Wednesday afternoon. The plane struck a tree and two resort cabins and burst into flames. The resort buildings were unoccupied.UD President Jeffrey Bullock, who led the prayer service in the Blades Chapel, said he didn’t know the cause of the crash.”It would be unethical or inappropriate to speculate,” he said. “We’ll know when the investigation is over.”The FAA is investigating the crash and was at the site Thursday morning. Tony Molinaro, spokesman from the FAA’s central region, based in Chicago, said the agency would not comment on the investigation until it is completed, more than likely within a few months.”We’re looking at the aircraft itself and, if we can down the line, talk to the two people on board,” Molinaro said of the process. Investigators also will talk to witnesses, pull maintenance records and air traffic-control tapes and check environmental conditions.An official from the National Transportation Safety Board said it would release a report on the crash in about two months.Senior Kevin Bradford, of Des Moines, a part-time flight instructor with the university’s aviation department, is close to Alsip and Vogt. He said the two had left Dubuque and were either on a trip or practicing.Steven Accinelli, UD Aviation Department chair and Director of the Flight Center, said the two were on an “authorized flight” and permitted to go to other airports and locations.Bradford said he heard “there was smoke in the cockpit and they had to divert to the nearest airport.”What they found was Cassville’s small public airport, located within walking distance of the downtown business district, with a 3,000-foot runway. To the west is the Mississippi River; to the east, the river bluffs. Bradford has experience landing at the airport.”That particular airport is difficult to land at with the obstructions, the power plants and the way it’s located on the river,” he said. “It’s a very good airport to teach people how to land in short distances, but it’s a very difficult airport to land at if you’re unexperienced, and those two were particularly experienced there. I have landed it there, the winds can be terrible, and kind of distort things.”For whatever reason, Alsip and Vogt came up short of the runway.”That particular airplane, if you’re landing on an unprepared surface such as an off-airport landing, they advise to land gear-up, because if you were to land on an unprepared surface, you could damage the landing gear and perhaps the airplane,” Bradford said.Bradford remembered hearing the airplane leave the Dubuque Regional Airport.”You never really think about having to not see that airplane again, or maybe not seeing them again,” he said. “You think they’re going to go and practice and come back, and you’ll see them again – so it’s really shocking.”Bradford added he couldn’t begin to imagine the flight’s waning moments.”It’s just kind of hard to think about some of the things that they must have been going through,” he said.Bullock noted the courage of John Cosgrove and Doug Fure, who put out the flames on the two students. Fure is an assistant football coach at Cassville High School; Cosgrove was working at the Alliant Energy Nelson Dewey power plant.”When I hear stories like that, I thank God for people like that,” he said, “and I thank God that they acted instinctively and in compassion for two human beings. We thank God that nobody on the ground was hurt. It could have been a very terribly horrendous event.”On Thursday, the collective UD community offered its prayers for Alsip and Vogt and their families.”It’s a university family and these are two of our students,” Bullock said after the services.More than 225 people, an overflow crowd, attended the services. Others were in Madison.A decade ago, UD experienced a similar loss. In 1998, an international flight student studying at the University of Dubuque died when the plane he was flying crashed in a hay field about a mile north of John Deere Dubuque Works.In a subsequent lawsuit, a jury found the university 50 percent at fault; Adam Varga, the pilot killed in the crash, also was found 50 percent at fault.Despite the crash, Bradford said he isn’t afraid to fly, and he praised the university.”Flying is my job, my hobby, what I love to do,” he said. “And every time you go fly, you take the risk of something happening to the airplane, but they train us from day one about what to do if something were to happen. I’m just glad to know that I’m at one of the safest universities (for) places to fly.”

Originally published by CRAIG D REBER TH staff writer/creber@wcinetcom.

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