Helicopter should not have flown
Hamilton man, four others killed in crash

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Chief Warrant Officer Paul S. Timmer of Hamilton flew to his death in a helicopter that should never have left the ground.

On Feb. 25, 1991, Timmer was piloting a UH-1 helicopter carrying four other people and cargo over El Salvador.

Twelve days before that crash, an oil sample was taken from a gearbox on the helicopter and sent to a lab. The lab labeled the sample with a "T," an Army maintenance code indicating contamination serious enough to ground the helicopter until the problem was fixed.

Minutes after taking off, the main rotor began to turn so slowly that soldiers from another helicopter could count the blades as they moved. Timmer tried to make an emergency landing on flat land, but instead the helicopter crashed into a lake.

Timmer and the four others were killed.

Fifteen days after the fatal crash, a report alerting mechanics to ground the helicopter because of the oil contamination problems was made available to Timmer's unit. Although the crash apparently was not directly linked to the contaminated oil, the lab report would have kept the helicopter on the ground.

Army spokesman Mark J. Jeude called the delay an "unacceptable situation." "We have looked at timeliness in our sample results," Jeude said.

"In other words, five people are dead because somebody didn't do a report," said Steve Timmer, a retired Hamilton police officer and father of the dead pilot. "It took them five weeks to get them out of the lake and get him back to me. I couldn't open the casket."