The Nome Nugget

Navy
Bomber
Explodes, Killing
11 Crewmen

CHINCOTEAGUE, Va. (AP) - A Navy Neptune bomber "exploded in a great ball of fire" shortly after takeoff yesterday and carried its 11 crewmen to death in a flaming crash on Virginia's eastern shore.

The twin-engine long-range aircraft ran into trouble a minute after it left the strip at the Chincoteague Naval Air Station. There was a sputtering noise, a witness reported, when the plane was only a couple of hundred feet in the air, then a window rattling blast and the plunge to earth in a big plume of smoke.

It slammed into a plowed field on the farm of Dennis Hurley, two miles south of the air station which lies on Virginia's outer banks along the Atlantic Ocean near the Maryland line.

The 11 occupants had no opportunity to jump from the faltering craft at such a low altitude. All apparently were buried in the burning fuselage in the 10-foot hole it made in the sandy soil.

Earl W. Darby, who runs a general store in the small town of Atlantic, was one of the first to the scene. He described the main explosion as "a great ball of fire."

He jumped in a pickup truck and drove to the field where it came down," he said.

"All I could find was a man's shoe and a man's foot."