ARMED FORCES: Death in the Bramble

When Captain Idon M. Hodge Jr., 30, checked the tower at Dobbins Air Force Base, the operator told him that the field was still open and cleared him for an instrument approach. Hodge, leading a flight of four F-84s of the Georgia National Guard’s crack stunt-flying team on a night-training flight from Miami, said he was starting down through the fog and rain. A moment later, the tower overheard one of Hodge’s wingmen say: “I don’t like this at all.” Another pilot in the formation answered: “How do you suppose I feel?”

Three minutes later, the four jets rammed at 480 m.p.h. into a rain-soaked patch of woods 25 miles northeast of Atlanta, 2½ minutes’ flying time from the field. They crashed within a 100-yd. circle, wreckage overlapped. The four bodies were thrown for half a mile into a bramble patch beyond the woods.

The three planes had obviously followed their leader in. But there was no explanation of what led Hodge, a World War II and Korea veteran (104 missions, three Jap planes) with 1,000 hours’ time in Thunderjets, to fly into the ground. The planes were on a gentle descent when they plowed across the scrub oak and piney woods. Instrument-approach procedure called for them at that point to be at 11,000 ft. Instead, they were at 1,100—which is ground level 25 miles northeast of Atlanta.