By Susanna Ray
Herald Writer
One person in a three-member air crew was injured Thursday afternoon when they bailed out just before an Oak Harbor-based EA-6B Prowler crashed near Forks, Navy officials said.
The search for the plane in an uninhabited area of the Olympic National Forest was called off until daybreak today.
The crew member suffered a possible broken leg and was taken by ambulance to Olympic Memorial Hospital in Port Angeles. The other two escaped injury and were taken by helicopter to Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, said Coast Guard Petty Officer Robert Lanier.
Navy controllers lost contact with the jet at about 1:30 p.m. while it was flying a routine training mission over the Olympic Mountains, said Lt. Kim Marks, spokeswoman for Navy Region Northwest. The plane was from VAQ-129, a training squadron, and had two instructors and one student on board. Their names were withheld pending notification of family. The injured person was identified as a 25-year-old male by Mike Glenn, CEO of the hospital.
The U.S. Coast Guard and Navy both sent helicopters to the scene, and the three were found at about 3 p.m. along U.S. 101 just south of the Klahowya Campground, said Ken Eldredge, an Olympic National Forest spokesman. The area is about 18 miles from Forks and is heavily wooded, with rolling foothills and ridges.
"It’s pretty rugged country," said Forks police chief Mike Powell.
Coast Guard rescuers had spotted two parachutes, a raft and three flares, said Coast Guard spokeswoman Sarah Foster-Snell.
Foggy conditions and deepening dusk hampered the search for the plane Thursday afternoon, Eldredge said.
"It’s not like we’re searching for people and bodies, so they’ll probably stop the ground search until daylight," he said.
Whidbey Island Naval Air Station spokeswoman Kim Martin said the Coast Guard "thought it saw something," so military investigators will go back out in helicopters first thing this morning.
In the meantime, local law enforcement officers were securing the scene by blocking access to the logging roads that go into the area, Powell said.
Officers and aid workers from the Forks Police Department, the Washington State Patrol, two fire districts, the Clallam County Sheriff’s Office, the National Parks Service and the state Department of Natural Resources all helped the Navy and Coast Guard in the search efforts.
"We are pretty remote out here," Powell said, "so when something happens, it involves a lot of different agencies. Everybody pulls together, because we’ve just got each other to depend on out here."
Navy officials said they didn’t know what caused the jet to go down.
Prowlers are all-weather jets that normally carry a crew of four —- one pilot and three electronic countermeasure officers — and are used to provide air protection for fighter jets by jamming enemy radar. All of the Navy’s 15 squadrons of four Prowlers each, "with one less now," Martin said, are based at the naval air station in Oak Harbor.
The $60 million planes were first put into use 30 years ago for the Vietnam War, and are no longer being made, although they’ve been in heavy demand to provide air cover during recent military actions such as the Gulf War, in Bosnia and the current airstrikes in Afghanistan.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
You can call Herald Writer Susanna Ray at 425-339-3439 or send e-mail to ray@heraldnet.com.
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