Probe begins into cloud-seeding plane crash that kills three

Tom Gardner

Tuesday, April 18, 2000 | 5:25 a.m.

RENO, Nev. - A cloud-seeding plane that flies the Sierra to coax every drop of moisture from winter storms crashed just moments after takeoff from the Stead Airport north of Reno, killing all three people on board.

The fatal crash occurred one mile north of the airport on Monday, apparently as the pilot desperately tried to return to the runway.

"It went a little bit nose high, then it went hard right - right wing low - and then it leveled or appeared to level from where we were and we both thought he was OK," helicopter pilot John Stone said.

"Then it went into another hard right bank, right wing real low - probably 90 degrees - and we saw it sliding sideways down."

Federal Aviation Administration officials were were to be joined today by investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board at the small airport that hosts the National Championship Air Races each September. It has no control tower.

The names of the victims have not been released.

They were working for Advanced Aviation of Reno, which was under contract to Nevada's Desert Research Institute, according to DRI spokesman John Doherty.

The institute had turned on ground-based generators ahead of an approaching storm. The plane was to have dropped silver iodide crystals in more rugged areas the ground generators can't reach south and east of Lake Tahoe.

DRI typically seeds clouds during Sierra storms to increase the winter snowpack that provides summertime water to western Nevada.

It was the second fatal plane accident involving an institute flight. Two pilots and two scientists were killed during a research mission 20 years ago last month.

The victims included research engineer Peter Wagner, the husband of former state Assemblywoman, Sen. and Lt. Gov. Sue Wagner.

Also killed were the pilot, John Lapham, a former board chairman of the Air Races; William Gaskell, an assistant research professor, and co-pilot Gordon F. Wicksten.

The B-26 Temop II plane left the Stead Airport on March 2, 1980, on a research mission and crashed in a ball of fire near Bald Mountain in the Sierra southwest of Lake Tahoe.

The twin-engine plane involved in Monday's crash was a Grumman S2F-1 Tracker used by the Navy in anti-submarine warfare. About 500 were built between February 1954 and early 1968.