Three Officials Held Responsible for Air Disaster; New Air Crash Kills Four

Three officials of the Lydda Airport control tower have been held directly responsible for a fatal accident on the airport’s main runway last week and have had legal proceedings instituted against them, it was announced today by a special committee investigating the disaster. The officials–civilian and military–have been suspended from their duties pending a full inquiry. The accident involved a TWA cargo plane which collided with an Israeli military transport plane on the ground while taking off. The transport plane was being towed by a tractor across the main runway although the control tower had cleared the TWA jet for take-off only moments before on the assumption that the run way was clear. Two civilian-military employees on the tractor were killed instantly. A third employee died today of his injuries. Both planes were demolished. Public confidence in Israel’s civilian air traffic control system was further jolted today by the crash of an air taxi fatal to four, and the apparent disappearance of a cloud-seeding plane with three men aboard. The air taxi of the Biaf Co. crashed near Hebron at mid-day killing its pilot and three passengers who were on a flight from Jerusalem to Eilat. The bodies were found near the wreckage. The missing Cesna aircraft was reported overdue last night on a flight over northern Israel. The plane was spraying cloud banks with silver iodide in an effort to stimulate rainfall. Searches of the Zevulon Valley north of Haifa today failed to reveal any trace of the aircraft or its occupants.

The committee investigating last week’s disaster was named by Transport Minister Shimon Peres immediately after the accident and completed its work last night. Mr. Peres presented a summary of its findings to the Cabinet today and will report to the Knesset tomorrow. The committee’s report stated in part that “the direct cause of the accident lay in shortcomings of the gravest nature in the alertness of three officials who were on duty in the control tower at the time.” According to an unofficial account. the collision occurred because one of the traffic controllers in the tower, apparently an Air Force man, authorized the towage of the transport plane across the runway without making certain that the civilian traffic controller was aware of his order. The latter cleared the TWA plane for take-off without knowing of the presence of another aircraft on the runway. A strike that would have paralyzed all Israeli airports was narrowly averted today when air traffic controllers at Lydda agreed at the last minute to call off a planned six-hour warning strike scheduled for this morning. The strike was aimed against the alleged “lynch campaign by the Israeli press in the aftermath of last week’s fatal accident. The traffic controllers maintained that the news media were blaming them unjustly for the crash.