Money orders, other correspondence scattered in Big Bateau Bay

10/25/02

By BRENDAN KIRBY
Staff Reporter

SPANISH FORT -- A plane hauling letters and packages for a delivery service crashed into the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta on Wednesday night, killing the pilot and spreading wreckage throughout Big Bateau Bay.

Authorities identified the pilot as Thomas J. Preziose, 54, who lived on University Boulevard in Mobile. His Cessna 208 Caravan took off from Brookley Field en route to Montgomery and disappeared from radar at 8:35 p.m. Wednesday. A frog hunter found the wreckage about 3 hours later, according to the Alabama Marine Police.

Authorities found Preziose's body floating among wreckage from the plane.

Most of the aircraft was in pieces, said Capt. Michael Patrick, the commander of the southern district of the Marine Police.

"It was crumpled like a stomped-on beer car," he said.

Authorities could not say Thursday why the plane crashed. An investigator from the National Transportation Safety Board was on the scene but could not be reached for comment. Marine Police officials said authorities would try to remove pieces of the plane this morning.

The propeller-driven plane went down in the middle of a broad area of 3- to 12-inch deep water about 1 miles north of Drifters Lounge on the Causeway, Patrick said.

It is perhaps the Delta's most famous duck-hunting area, with a large alligator population. The area was exceptionally quiet and abandoned when a reporter and photographer viewed the wreckage by boat Thursday morning. No fishermen or rescue workers were anywhere to be found during an hourlong survey of the area.

From a distance, it was hard to distinguish the white flashes of plane wreckage from the stalking white herons and white ibis.

Patrick said his agency was notified of the missing plane at about 9 p.m. but was not given a precise location. He said his officers looked for the plane for about three hours along with a Coast Guard helicopter. But he said shallow water and darkness complicated those efforts.

"It's just real hard to search in that delta at night," he said.

Patrick said he came across Chris Rivers, a commercial frog hunter on an airboat, and asked him to help find the plane.

"I drafted him," he said. "He'd done us a tremendous job."

Rivers, who lives in Okeechobee, Fla., said he made one sweep without success but told marine police that he would contact them if he found anything. About 20 minutes later, he found the plane in the shallow bay where his airboat was able to maneuver.

"They couldn't get to where I could get, and that's how I found it," the boater said.

Rivers, 37, who has served on a volunteer fire and rescue team in Florida for about 20 years, praised the efforts of the marine police and others.

"Those guys were working hard. ... They broke their backs doing the best they could," he said. "They were the most concerned bunch of guys I've ever worked with."

Preziose worked for Mid-Atlantic Freight, a Greensboro, N.C., charter company that leases planes to different com panies on 17 scheduled routes. He was carrying letters and other business-to-business documents for DHL Worldwide Express, a package delivery company based in Brussels, Belgium, according to a DHL spokeswoman.

Jim Spinder, president of Atlantic Aero Holdings, which owns Mid-Atlantic Freight, said Preziose had worked for the company for about four months. He said the pilot made regular flights along a route that ferried packages and let ters from Mobile to Montgomery and then on to Atlanta. Preziose then would return the next day.

Spinder said Preziose had had extensive experience in the air before joining the company.

"He's not a new pilot, let's put it that way. The man had thousands of hours of flying," he said.

Spinder said the plane was manufactured in 1999 and nev er had any maintenance problems. He said Mid-Atlantic Freight, founded in 1987, had never before suffered a fatal plane crash.

"We really feel for Thomas and members of his family," he said.

DHL, founded in 1969, reported sales of more than $6 billion in 2001. It makes deliveries to 120,000 destinations worldwide.

On Wednesday, according DHL spokeswoman Tracy Egan, Preziose was carrying 420 pounds of correspondence.

Most of that scattered in Big Bateau Bay after the plane crashed. Patrick said marine police recovered what they could and turned it over to the NTSB.

(Environmental Editor Bill Finch contributed to this re port.)