MIAMI -- A Coast Guard radar plane returning from a patrol for drug smugglers caught fire and crashed early Friday near a U.S. naval station in Puerto Rico, killing all four men aboard.
They were the first deaths for the Coast Guard since it began drug-smuggling interdiction work.
The E-2C Hawkeye, a twin-engine turboprop radar aircraft, crashed about 500 yards of the runway at Roosevelt Roads Naval Station at 12:21 a.m., said Lt. Cmdr. Jeff Karonis, a Coast Guard spokesman in Miami.
The naval station is in a remote area on the east coast of Puerto Rico.
The crew was coming in for a landing after completing its patrol and reported to military air traffic controllers that there was a fire aboard the aircraft, Karonis said. The crew also reported hydraulic problems.
'These are the first deaths that we've had in the drug war -- since we've actively pursued drug interdiction in the early 1970s,' Karonis said.
Chief Petty Officer Luis Diaz, also a Coast Guard spokesman in Miami, said the plane broke apart on impact.
'It burned and scattered all over the field,' Diaz said. 'It was really torn apart.'
Military investigators had not determined the cause of the crash, Diaz said.
'The Coast Guard is small,' said a Coast Guard official who asked to remain anonymous. 'Everyone realy knows each other. This really hits.'
Diaz said the Coast Guard station in Miami received calls from guardsmen as far away as San Francisco and Seattle, asking for information and the names of the fatalities.
'We are a very close, small service -- like a family,' Diaz said.
The Coast Guard identified the victims as pilots Lt. Duane E. Stenbak, 37, of Billings, Mont., and Lt. Paul E. Perlt, 29, of St. Paul, Minn.; combat information center officer Lt. Craig E. Lerner, 32, of Philadelphia, Penn, and aviation electronics technician Petty Officer Matthew H. Baker, 29, of Ray, Ariz., who was operating the radar. All the men were based in St. Augustine, Fla.
The Coast Guard uses four Hawkeyes, on loan from the Navy since 1987, to search for drug smugglers, Karonis said. If a suspected aircraft is spotted, the Hawkeye crew notifies the U.S. Customs Service or the Coast Guard to dispatch a plane to intercept the suspects.
All Coast Guard Hawkeyes, built by Grumman Corp., are based at the agency's air station at St. Augustine.
The E-2C is equipped with a 24-foot diameter rotating radar dome on top that allows the Coast Guard to survey nearly 3 million cubic miles of surrounding air space at sea, while monitoring 150,000 square miles of ocean surface.
