Navajos Indians want debris from 1956 mid air collision removed from Grand Canyon

From The Tucson Citizen
http://www.tucsoncitizen.com
Some Navajos say they want debris left from a 1956 crash of two airliners over the Grand Canyon removed, calling it long-neglected trash.
But federal officials aren’t sure that the debris is from the collision of a TWA Super Constellation and United Airlines DC-7 that killed 128 people aboard the two planes.

“We’re not in the position to look into this at this point,” said Ted Lopatkiewicz, a spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board. “With the aviation wreckage, I don’t know if the airlines have any responsibility to clean it up.”

The June 30, 1956, crash was one of the worst in aviation history at that time and led to the creation of the FAA, which regulates practices of the airline industry, including flight paths.

Witnesses say wreckage from the TWA airliner landed on the shoulder of Temple Butte and the United plane shattered into bits on the south face of Chuar Butte near the confluence of the Little Colorado and the Colorado rivers.

Nearly 50 years after the accident, residents say a large airline tire remains embedded near charred limestone rock about 5,000 feet above the canyon’s rivers on a plateau on Navajo land.

They also say debris from the crash — fragments of fuselage and chunks of yellow glass — is flung over an area the size of a baseball field.

Photos of the debris were taken six months ago and shown to Michael Polay, a former Air Force crash investigator and a safety science associate professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott.

He said the materials are airplane parts, apparently weathered over several decades, but couldn’t confirm that the fragments belong to the TWA or United planes.

“The things are coming down from 21,000 feet. As they are coming down, they can get blown by the wind. It is a good educated guess the tire may have been part of a larger part,” Polay said.

The canyon floor was swept of airplane debris in the late 1970s. A scrap removal business hauled off the remaining debris lifted out of the canyon and onto the rim.

“If the debris is not part of the landscape around the Grand Canyon, natives would say, ‘that’s the impact of the modern age,’ it’s trash, and it doesn’t belong in the picture of the area,” said Don Yellowman, grazing official for the Gap/Bodaway community. “I say to federal officials or the airlines . . . clean it.”