Words Of Terror: `We Hit Somebody'

DETROIT - For a few heartbeats, there was quiet relief in the fog-shrouded control tower at Metro Airport. It appeared disaster was averted.

Then came the voice from the cockpit of Flight 299.

``We aborted takeoff. We hit somebody.''

That account came yesterday from Thomas Murphy, president of the Detroit local of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, who listened to tower tapes and talked to controllers on duty when Northwest Flight 299, a Boeing 727 headed for Memphis, Tenn., hit Northwest Flight 1482, a DC-9 bound for Pittsburgh, at Metro Airport Monday afternoon.

Eight people were killed and 24 injured aboard Flight 1482.

Murphy said controllers frantically warned each plane to steer away from the other when they realized the disoriented pilot of the DC-9 had strayed into the path of the larger jet. And then, listening for the aircrafts' engines because they couldn't see them through the fog, the controllers believed for a few seconds that they heard the 727 climbing into the air unscathed.

John Lauber, head of a team of 15 National Transportation Safety Board crash investigators, said late yesterday the cockpit crew of the DC-9 actually saw the 727 barrelling toward it before the crash.

``Both the captain and the first officer of the DC-9 reported that they were aware at that point that they were on the runway,'' he said. ``Both reported that they saw the 727 proceeding towards them.

And from there, of course, things happened very, very rapidly.''

Lauber divulged few other details of investigators' interviews yesterday with the planes' captains. The results of drug tests on the crews were not available yet.

Northwest officials said yesterday the pilot at the helm of the DC-9 - which made at least two wrong turns from gate to runway - had recently returned to active duty after a five-year medical leave. Capt. William Lovelace, 52, was flying his 13th flight since his return and his first without a Northwest check pilot monitoring his relicensing process, the airline said.

By last night, six of the dead were identified: Heidi Joost, 43, of Dearborn, Mich., a Northwest flight attendant; Thomas Copriva, 50, of Memphis; Daniel Loughnane, 44, of Memphis; Fred Zitto, 59, of Clifton, N.J.; Mary Blankenship, 37, of Windsor, Ontario; and Kingsley Brown, 30, of Pittsburgh.

There were 44 passengers and crew aboard the DC-9. Most jumped or slid to safety. All 153 passengers and crew aboard the relatively unscathed 727 survived.

While Lauber said that the flight data recorder was sent to Washington and would not be evaluated until today, accounts of what went wrong came yesterday from people familiar with the tower talk and cockpit traffic in the moments before the jets hit.

All said that Lovelace, either blinded by fog or confused by runway markings, made two wrong turns, the second into the path of the 727.

Murphy said ground controllers in the tower couldn't see planes and relied on pilots' reports of where they were. The DC-9 cockpit crew on at least one occasion said the plane was at an intersection that doesn't exist at Metro.

Before the collision, the crew of the DC-9 realized they had mistakenly turned onto runway 3 Center instead of a parallel taxiway and told ground controllers, according to both Murphy and a controller working at the time.

The ground controller then warned an air controller: ``Hey, I think there's somebody on your runway. Don't clear anybody for takeoff.''

But the 727, given a go-ahead 90 seconds earlier, was already accelerating into its takeoff roll down runway 3-Center.

Controllers also barked at the DC-9: ``Get off it! Get off!''