Aircraft Crash at Fort Stewart

Thanks to Adam W. from Scan Savannah who gave me the heads up on this incident, otherwise I would have missed it. Unfortunately, this aircraft crash was fatal, as a result I am withholding the N-number from this post in case the families of the deceased have not been notified yet. I have not seen any identifications on the TV News or the Newspaper, so I can only assume that family notifications are not complete.

Communications seemed to be primarily on Fort Stewart Fire Tac 1 (TG 3472 of the Fort Stewart/Hunter AAF TRS) and on 279.625 (Marne Radio). The tower at Wright AAF on Fort Stewart relayed traffic between Fort Stewart Fire Incident Command, who only had the UHF trunked radios and RESCUE 6542 who was on 279.625. RESCUE 6542, a USCG HH-65C from Air Station Savannah at Hunter AAF picked up the ELT from the crashed aircraft and triangulated it's location. After DFing the ELT, they were then able to locate a wing from the aircraft and the coordinates were passed to the Fire crews. Fort Stewart MEDIC 4 located the wreckage and a body at 11:40 PM. 3 0ther bodies were located later in the search and recovery operations. Throughout the search, RESCUE 6542 was also in communications with USCG Sector Charleston and Air Station Savannah.

Despite being called in late in the game (essentially 4 hours after the crash occurred), the Coast Guard quickly and efficiently located the wreck location and did a good job of vectoring the ground crews in despite the lack of direct communication (they apparently did toward the end via a Lt. from the Civil Air Patrol). I kept wondering throughout why Fort Stewart Fire was not equipped with some sort of radio to communicate with air assets. Given that one of their taskings is aircraft crashes, you would think that they would have the equipment to communicate on airband,military frequencies, or VHF land mobile to contact search aircraft directly.


Mac McCormick, KF4LMT
kf4lmt@comcast.net