Teen rescued at plane PARENTS KILLED: Rescuers battled through Francis Marion Forest to find the single-engine Piper that was taking a New Jersey family to Florida.
Published on 01/05/00
BY GLENN SMITH and BRIAN HICKS
The Post and Courier
Deep in the thicket of the Francis Marion National Forest, Henry Stackhouse and Angus McBride had been searching for the crashed plane nearly five hours when they heard it: a cold, plaintive cry for help.
Just a few yards away from the Department of Natural
Resources search party, 18-year-old Molly Haupt sat bruised
and battered on the broken wing of the single- engine Piper
Comanche, her parents dead in the cockpit.
Shivering and in pain, Haupt was still alert and coherent
enough to hear Stackhouse and McBride's quiet conversation,
to see them flash a signal light to the search plane above.
More than six hours after the crash, she was rescued.
"She wasn't in shock, but she was cold," Stackhouse recalled
Tuesday afternoon. "She was pretty calm, though. If she
hadn't yelled, we might not have found her for a long time.
The woods are thick out there."
The New Jersey family was on its way to fun in the Florida sun.
William Haupt, a 727 pilot for United Airlines, his wife Sharon
and daughter Molly were going to meet friends in Key West.
They were still celebrating Sharon's early retirement from the
library at Princeton High School. They planned to stop for the
night in Savannah.
But over Georgetown, they realized they wouldn't make it. Haupt talked to Charleston air traffic controllers on Monday evening and Molly Haupt said he was low on fuel.
Shortly after that, the plane disappeared from radar.
When rescue workers found the aircraft at about 2:30 a.m. Tuesday, it was lying at a 60-degree angle in the thick woods outside Cordesville. The plane's nose was crushed and the engine pushed back into the cockpit. William and Sharon Haupt, both 56, were dead.
Molly Haupt was traveling in a rear seat in the four-seat plane, which may have saved her life, said Capt. Bill Salisbury of the Berkeley County Rescue Squad.
"Her body was slammed against the front seats, which helped cushion the impact it seems," Salisbury said.
Rescue workers had to clear a path through the dense underbrush to enable a four-wheel drive pick-up truck to get to Molly Haupt. She was carted on a stretcher 50 yards to the truck, which ferried her to an ambulance.
On Tuesday, Molly Haupt was recuperating at the Medical University of South Carolina. MUSC officials would not reveal her condition, saying they were under strict orders of confidentiality from Haupt's family.
Rob Dewey, with the Coastal Crisis Chaplaincy, was with Molly most of the day, starting at the time they pulled her out of the woods. He said the teen-ager, a student at Columbia University, was emotionally devastated.
"She said it happened suddenly, without warning," Dewey said.
William Haupt had not filed a flight plan before leaving New Jersey. Charleston air traffic controllers first heard from him when he radioed the control tower at Charleston International Airport and asked for landing directions, said George Prellezo, regional director of the National Transportation Safety Board.
Prellezo put the time of the call at 6:30 p.m. Rescue workers, however, said they believed the call came after 9 p.m. The plane was about 25 miles northeast of the airport at the time.
Almost immediately after the communication, Haupt radioed back and told the tower he was running out of fuel, Prellezo said. A short time later, the air traffic controllers lost radio and radar contact with the plane.
The Charleston County Sheriff's Office began a search in the Awendaw area around 9:30 p.m. after receiving a call from the Federal Aviation Authority.
Shortly after 10 p.m., the search moved into Berkeley County. More than 100 people, helicopters and an Air Force C-17 eventually participated in the search, Salisbury said.
The C-17 was able to place rescue workers in the general area of the crash by tracing an emergency beacon from the plane, Salisbury said. An area pilot then narrowed the search by tracing the beacon with a hand-held receiver on the ground, he said.
Rescue units found the plane about three miles into the woods off Highway 402 near Cordesville.
Stackhouse and McBride of DNR were carrying walkie-talkies set to the same frequency as the plane's emergency beacon. They also carried lights so search planes could track their position. At a little after 2 a.m., Molly Haupt saw the light and started yelling for them.
Stackhouse said the woods were so thick it would have taken a while to find her if she hadn't yelled. While McBride talked to her, Stackhouse and others who arrived cleared a path to a dirt road, where a DNR truck moved in to pick her up.
The plane appeared to have clipped some trees and then crashed, Salisbury said. The nose was crushed and the wings, while still attached to the fuselage, were badly bent and twisted.
There was no sign of fire, which supports the theory that Haupt ran out of gas, Salisbury said.
The Piper Comanche has a 60-gallon fuel tank and can fly as high as 18,500 feet, according to Rising Up, an aircraft performance Web site.
The flight from New Jersey to Charleston is about 520 miles and, in a Piper, takes about four hours and 15 minutes, said Ralph Brown, an area pilot. Almost 54 gallons of fuel would be burned along the way, assuming a standard speed of 125 knots and a consumption rate of 10 gallons per hour, he said.
If the plane was traveling slower or was aided by a tail wind, less fuel would be consumed, Brown said. But fighting a head wind would burn more fuel, he said.
If Haupt was flying down the coast from New Jersey, he would have encountered almost direct head winds over South Carolina. A weather balloon launched by the Charleston office of the National Weather Service Monday evening reported 21 knots of wind out of the south-southwest at 3,000 feet, according to Eleanor Vallier-Talbot, a forecaster at the Weather Service.
Haupt had been a commercial pilot for United Airlines since March 1990, according to Joe Hopkins, an airline spokesman. He flew domestic flights and was based at Kennedy International Airport in New York.
Haupt had no accidents on his record, said Roland Herwig, an FAA spokesman. He had owned the Comanche at least three years.
Richard Haupt, the pilot's brother, said Haupt also flew transport jets in the Air Force. He was rated to fly almost anything that flew.
Other family members planned to travel to Charleston Tuesday and meet with Berkeley County Coroner Wade Arnette today. Volunteers from the Grace Episcopal Church were taking shifts staying with Molly Haupt until her family could arrive.
John Kazmark, principal of Princeton High School, said Sharon Haupt had been a librarian in the Princeton school system for 26 years, the last five at the high school. In December, the school held a retirement party for her. Kazmark said she displayed no ambivalence about retiring.
"She knew what she'd done here. She'd done well," Kazmark said. "She was looking forward to spending time with her family and traveling."
Kazmark said the family had recently taken an apartment in Manhattan to be closer to Molly, who was also a pilot, while she was at school.
Monday night Kazmark found an e-mail waiting from Sharon. It said, "I might be hard to reach for a while. I'm off to Key West and then London." Kazmark sent her this message back: "Must be rough."
At Princeton High on Tuesday, counselors and psychologists were dispatched to give the news to teachers, who in turn read a brief statement about the crash in classes. Some students met with counselors to work through it. Most people, Kazmark said, took it pretty rough.
"I think we have to be heartened that Molly survived and will be OK. If only one of them could have survived, I think that's what her mother and father would have wanted to happen. That's the only thing we can take any comfort in."
