Title: Military Ordered To Put New Navigational Aids In Passenger Jets
Publication: Las Vegas Review-Journal
Date: April 27, 1996
Page: 8A


Associated Press

WASHINGTON - In response to the plane crash that killed Commerce 
Secretary Ron Brown, Defense Secretary William Perry ordered the 
military services Friday to install new navigation aids on all their 
passenger planes.

Writing to the service secretaries, Perry said the work should be done 
"as a matter of highest priority." The cost, together with an 
accelerated plan to install flight data recorders, is estimated at $335 
million.

At a news conference, Paul Kaminiski, the Pentagon's technology 
chief, said Perry's order reflects a desire to "do every reasonable 
thing we could do" to equip all military passenger aircraft with better 
and newer navigation aids as soon as possible.

In the first step, the Air Force and Navy will install hand-held 
receivers in all their passenger planes. The instruments receive signals 
from navigation satellites to pinpoint location in technology called the 
Global Positioning System.

The hand-held GPS devices will be installed in 2,857 planes by Sept. 30.

The Air Force T-43 that veered from its course and crashed in heavy wind 
and rain. April 3 on an instrument approach to Dubrovnik airport in 
Croatia, had neither the GPS navigation aid nor a flight data recorder. 
Brown and 34 others died in the crash.

Kaminski acknowledged that the hand-held GPS devices might not prevent 
such accidents but would do "some good."

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"As the next priority, you should install flight data recorders on your 
fixed-wing, commercial-derived aircraft."

Defense Secretary William Perry
Letter to military service secretaries
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He said the system constitutes an interim improvement but not the final 
step, since the handheld devices are not integrated with a map from 
which a path can be plotted. The Navy is to have fully integrated GPS 
devices in its aircraft by 1999 and the Air Force by 2000.

Perry ordered the Army to equip all 268 of its fixed-wing aircraft with 
integrated GPS equipment by 1999 and all 2,809 passenger-carrying 
helicopters by 2000.

"As the next priority, you should install flight data recorders on your 
fixed-wing commercial-derived aircraft," Perry wrote to the service 
secretaries. "Finally, you should consider the installation of flight 
data recorders on your other passenger aircraft, including troopcarrier 
and rotary wing aircraft."

Federal Aviation Administration rules that require flight data recorders 
in commercial passenger liners exempt military aircraft.

Brown's plane, which crashed as he led a delegation of businessmen on a 
trip mainly dealing with the rebuilding of war-torn Bosnia, was a 
converted Boeing 737 that would have had the recorder as a civilian 
craft.

Authorities completed the firs segment of investigations into the crash 
Friday with recovery of the plane's tail section, its last and biggest 
piece.

The section's upper part painted with the American flag had to be 
chopped off because the tail was too big to be moved in one piece to a 
U.S. air base in Ram stein, Germany, for examination. Other examination 
will be done in laboratories in the United States.	

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