Neighbors watched with alarm as jet missed mark, then plunged

By RODRIGO ZAMITH, JOY POWELL and CURT BROWN, Star Tribune s taff w riters

Last update: July 31, 2008 - 11:03 PM

OWATONNA, MINN. - Ruth Hinton has lived for 40 years in the same home a couple miles west of Degner Regional Airport.

"Planes fly over here all the time," said Hinton, 63. "But I have never seen one fly so low."

She'd gone to her basement Thursday morning when a windstorm blew through town at about 8:35 a.m. An hour later, after the winds calmed, she'd headed back upstairs to check on a sapling she had recently planted in her yard.

"When I came up, I looked out the door and I saw the plane flying very, very low. It went just above the tree over there," she said, pointing to a 50-foot maple.

Hinton didn't know that the plane she had seen nearly shearing her maple was carrying customers of glass manufacturer Viracon Inc., one of Owatonna's major employers, or that moments later it would be a pile of twisted wreckage in a field past the end of the runway.

Unlike Hinton, whose home is 2 miles from the airport, Viracon employee Gary Ayers saw the plane as it was almost ready to land.

Ayers was driving a semi-trailer truck north on Interstate 35 at about 9:40 a.m. when the jet caught his eye.

"I saw the plane coming and said to myself: 'He's way too high to approach a landing,'" Ayers said. "I didn't put two and two together until I heard the sirens."

Ayers, 59, said the early morning storm was no longer a factor at the time of the crash. "The wind wasn't blowing; the storm was gone. He should have went around and tried again," he said.

Katelyn Sylvara, 14, and her younger brother, Jacob, were watching TV on 15th St. NE when they heard the jet overhead.

"After I saw it that low, I knew it was going to crash," Jacob, 10, told the Owatonna People's Press.

He ran upstairs to look out the window to see where the plane was, but trees blocked his view.

Grace Buskovick didn't see the crash, but she heard it.

"I just heard a loud noise that sounded like a firecracker going off," said Buskovick, 86, who lives a half-mile west of the airport.

More than 50 first-responders swooped in to the cornfields near the runway after the crash, but found only one person clinging to life. That victim died later Thursday at Owatonna Hospital.

Otherwise, law enforcement officers faced a grisly task, recovering bodies while trying not to disturb wreckage that could give investigators clues to how the accident happened.

"Our primary job is to preserve the scene," said Owatonna Police Chief Shaun LaDue. "It's a difficult scene. It's unreal."

rzamith@startribune.com • 612-673-4895 jpowell@startribune.com • 612-673-7750 curt.brown@startribune.com • 612-673-4767

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