Sabotage?

Dobrynin jet endangered

As an Ilyushin 62 jet carrying 130 people, including Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin, approached New York City's Kennedy Airport on the afternoon of Jan. 18, something went dangerously awry in the control tower. The letters and numbers identifying a blip on the radar screen as the Soviet plane suddenly disappeared. An unidentified voice then ordered the Soviet pilot to descend from 8,000 ft. to 4,000 ft., into airspace that is normally reserved for small planes. For three minutes--and six miles--the jetliner flew at low altitude over heavily populated Long Island, until a tower supervisor discovered what had happened. He quickly radioed the pilot and patiently guided the plane to a safe and uneventful landing. Last week the FBI disclosed that it had begun an investigation to determine whether the mishap was intentional.

The incident occurred at the height of American public outrage over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Iran's refusal to release the 50 hostages being held at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Jimmy Carter had just announced a program of sanctions against the Soviet Union, including an embargo on shipments of grain to the U.S.S.R., and U.S. longshoremen were balking at handling any Soviet cargoes. Then, Local 160 of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) posted a notice on a bulletin board at the Kennedy tower urging members not to guide Soviet or Iranian aircraft in or out of the airport unless specifically ordered to do so by one of their Federal Aviation Administration superiors.

Shortly afterward, Government investigators suspect, one of the airport's 40 controllers decided to take the protest one step further. The investigators believe that the controller tampered with the tower's computer to erase the Aeroflot's identification tag; then either he or a colleague ordered the plane down to the dangerously low altitude. Such action would constitute a crime carrying a maximum penalty of a $10,000 fine and 20 years in prison.

By week's end the FBI had questioned some two dozen controllers, but a number of others were refusing to provide any information to the investigators except their names, ages and home addresses. Anthony Maimone, head of Local 160, insisted that human error or mechanical failure was to blame and accused the FAA of "blowing this thing out of proportion." Said a former PATCO official: "I just cannot believe that a controller who was not certifiably psychotic would do a thing like that." Whatever the case, said Gabriel Hartl, a spokesman for the Air Traffic Control Association, only an "act of God" averted a disaster.

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