Doubts raised in jet crash

A neighbor sent me this article about a 1967 crash near Hendersonville, NC. The
controlling ATC was the Asheville TRACON. This predates the online NTSB accident
archive, but I once had a hardcopy of the accident investigation. I'll look for it.

I found the original online at http://makeashorterlink.com/?S25C52A7B

Here's the content:

--- all remainder is quoted from the Hendersonville News ---

The crash of Piedmont Airlines Flight 22 on July 19, 1967, left searing memories
for dozens of witnesses and rescue workers in Hendersonville.

The Boeing 727 and a Cessna collided in mid-air over town on that July afternoon
37 years ago, raining debris and body parts over a large area.

The jetliner came to rest on Camp Pinewood's trash dump. William R. Kuykendall
and his wife, who lived a few hundred yards from the crash site, were
fortunately vacationing at Windy Hill Beach, S.C., when a woman's body crashed
through their roof and into their living room.

The crash killed everyone aboard the small plane and the jetliner, including a
promising Naval officer, John T. McNaughton, who had just been named Secretary
of the Navy.

The crash of Flight 22 faded into history long ago and would have stayed there
if not for the interest of Paul Houle, an amateur historian and aviation
enthusiast from Spartanburg. S.C. Houle initiated and became the driving force
behind the Flight 22 Memorial off Orrs Camp Road in Hendersonville. But honoring
the memory of those aboard the planes was not the end of his interest.

Over the past several years, Houle, who was an accident investigator in the
Army, has doggedly combed through the reams of investigation files that came
after the mid-air collision of the Virginia-bound Boeing and the Asheville-bound
Cessna. Houle's efforts were chronicled Sunday by Walt Wooton, a writer for our
sister paper, the Herald-Journal in Spartanburg.

Houle's own reading of the material has led him to conclude that the official
cause of the accident by the National Transportation Safety Board and the
Federal Aviation Administration is wrong. It goes too far to say that Houle has
found a smoking gun. But he has found a possible conflict of interest in the
probe, confusion in the radio communications issued from the Asheville control
tower and, well, a smoking ashtray.

# Among Houle's findings:The lead NTSB investigator of the accident, Thomas
Saunders, was the brother of a Piedmont vice president, H.K. "Zeke" Saunders.
# The Cessna pilot accurately reported his heading to the Asheville tower, a
heading that should have alerted the air traffic controller of the collision course.
# An ashtray fire -- yes, pilots could smoke in the cockpit then -- may have
distracted the crew, yet the NTSB report ignores it.

Houle's challenge to the official findings has not been independently reviewed
but his petition has enough validity to get the agency's attention.

"We'll take a look at it and start an evaluation," said Tom Haueter, the deputy
director of the NTSB's Office of Aviation Safety. "That's about where it is at
the moment."

It would serve the pursuit of truth if a federal judge would unseal records of a
civil lawsuit arising from the crash, which was settled in February 1971. U.S.
District Court Judge Lacy H. Thornburg turned down Houle's request to unseal the
file in May 2003.

Houle has turned up enough questions to warrant a second look by the federal air
safety regulators.

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