Wednesday March 28 2:48 PM ET
Wreckage From Second U.S. Warplane Found in Scotland

By Nick Tattersall

LONDON (Reuters) - Rescuers scouring the Scottish Highlands in atrocious weather discovered wreckage from a second U.S. F-15C warplane Wednesday, three days after two of the single-seat fighters and their pilots disappeared.

Civilian and military rescue teams have braved freezing temperatures, heavy snow, high winds and avalanches to find two U.S. airmen and their aircraft which went missing on a low-flying
exercise Monday.

``We have found the tail part of the second aircraft some 400 yards from the wreckage of the first,'' said a Royal Air Force spokesman.

He said the search had been called off for the night and would resume at first light Thursday.

The wreckage from one of the warplanes and the body of one of the missing pilots were found Tuesday.

The pilot was identified Wednesday evening by Grampian Police as Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth John Hyvonen, 40, from the 48th Operations Support Squadron, based at the RAF Lakenheath air base in eastern England.

Michael Mulford of the RAF earlier described how the weather had hampered rescue efforts.

``The weather is winning at the moment. It is classic avalanche conditions, the worst we have seen in 20 years. There have been several small ones already,'' he told Reuters.

Radio Contact Lost

Two single-seat F-15Cs, among the U.S. Air Force's most effective fighters, were on a low-flying training mission over Scotland when radio contact was lost at about 1:15 p.m.
Monday.

Mulford said U.S. Air Force accident investigators had arrived at the rescue coordination center at the RAF Kinloss base, but were waiting for the weather to improve before traveling to the crash site near the summit of Ben Macdui, Scotland's second highest mountain.

Two U.S. Air Force MH-53 helicopters and an RAF Sea King helicopter were on standby to join the search if weather conditions improved.

A British Tornado fighter-bomber earlier used heat-seeking infrared equipment to search for the planes' engines against a snow-covered expanse of the Cairngorms mountain range.

The U.S. Air Force have named the second missing airman as Captain Kirk Jones of the 493rd Fighter Squadron, also based at Lakenheath.

The cause of the accident remained unclear. A spokeswoman at Lakenheath declined to speculate on reports that the fighters had crashed after touching in mid-air.

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