Peres Asks Finance Ministry for $5.250 Million to Improve Safety at Lydda Airport

Transport Minister Shimon Peres told the Knesset today that he has asked the Finance Ministry for a supplemental budget of $5,250 million to improve safety at Lydda Airport. Mr. Peres announced the request after he gave Knesset members a summary of the findings of a special panel that investigated a fatal accident at the airport two weeks ago. He said the findings could not be published in full because of military aspects. The Israel Air Force shares Lydda Airport with commercial aviation. The accident involved a collision on the main runway between a TWA cargo plane and an Air Force transport. Mr. Peres said the extra budget would be used to install additional radar systems in the control tower with a range of 60 miles, new distance measuring equipment, and other modern electronic devices now lacking. Mr. Peres said the Air Force has promised to comply with all recommendations of the investigating panel that apply to it. The panel held three traffic control officers on duty in the Lydda tower at the time of the accident directly responsible for the collision that took three lives and they have been suspended pending further investigation.

In addition, Mr. Peres announced today that he has dismissed the chief air traffic control officer at Lydda. That action renewed the threat of a strike by flight control officials which could paralyze all of Israel’s airfields. They charged a "purge" and claimed that they were being made scapegoats for the accident. A demonstration strike scheduled for yesterday was called off at the last minute. The panel’s report commended the TWA pilot for taking swift action to try to avoid hitting the military transport which was being towed across the main runway in his take-off path. The panel said the American captain "displayed intelligence and presence of mind" when he tried to hasten his take off. As a result a head on collision was avoided thus reducing casualties. But two Israeli military-civilian employes were killed instantly and a third died yesterday of his injuries. Both planes were demolished.

Apart from the panel’s report, Israeli civil aviation suffered two other blows in the last two days. Four persons were killed in a plane crash at Hebron yesterday and three other persons have been missing since Saturday night when a plane on a cloud-seeding assignment disappeared over northern Israel. The four victims of yesterday’s crash of a private air taxi were identified today. The pilot was Yishai Ben Aryeh, 26 a former combat pilot of the Israel Air Force who was invalided out of the service recently owing to injuries received when he had to ditch his plane on the Suez front. The passengers were Rafael Cohen, an industrialist, and two of his employes, a secretary and a technician, whose names were not announced. The plane was on a flight from Jerusalem to Eilat when it crashed. A committee is investigating the accident. An air and sea search continued today for a missing Cesna plane which was seeding clouds with silver iodide in an effort to stimulate rainfall. No trace of the aircraft or the three men aboard has been found. The search in the coastal waters and overland between Acre and the Lebanese border has been hampered by bad weather.