All of those killed and injured were on the first floor of the hotel when the jet, gliding without power, glanced off the flat roof of a bank, hit the ground, then bounced up and smashed into the hotel marquee. Fire covered much of the center-front of the building.
''It was like skipping a rock,'' said Robert Duncan, staff lawyer for the Indianapolis Airport Authority.
The pilot, Maj. Bruce Teagarden, 35, of Mt. Morris, Pa., ejected seconds before the single-engine A-7D Corsair crashed at 9:15 a.m. He parachuted into a parking lot less than two blocks from the crash site, said Robert Spitler, acting director of the Airport Authority.
Teagarden apparently was following approved procedure after his aging jet fighter lost power.
Marion County medical examiners said all ten of those killed may have been hotel employees. Three had been positively identified and one tentatively identified by 8:00 p.m., said Dennis Nicholas of the coroner`s office. Dental records must be used to identify the five other victims.
The four for whom names were available were hotel employees: Beth Louise Goldberg, 30; Emma J. Brownlee, 37; and Brenda Joyce Henry, 26, all of Indianapolis; and Allen Manter, 18, of Amo.
Six people were injured. Thomas Murray, 41, of Indianapolis, was listed in critical condition with third-degree burns over 95 percent of his body. Darryl Crenshaw, 28, a firefighter, was in serious condition. Betty Gonzales, 52, a hotel employee, was in fair condition, with second-degree burns over 10 percent of her body.
Davis Bosan, 21, of Mattoon, Ill.; John Cameron, 43, of Wauwatosa, Wis. and pilot Teagarden were treated at area hospitals and released. Teagarden was released to military medical authorities.
None of the three customers and six employees in the bank, Bank One, was injured when the plane tore off two-thirds of the building`s roof and collapsed the southwest corner of the structure. ''It`s hard to imagine there were human beings that walked away from it, but they did,'' said Fred Roesner, head of security for Bank One.
Some of the hotel`s guests were also counting themselves among the fortunate. Nearly half of the previous night`s 107 guests had checked out before 9:00 a.m., said a spokesman for the Ramada chain in Tucson. And more than 50 guests attending an engineering conference at the back of the hotel were unscathed when the plane hit, said Neil Sullivan, a spokesman for the Marion County Sheriff`s Department.
But those gathered near the lobby were not so fortunate. The plane disintegrated on impact, with parts of it hurtling 75 feet into the hotel, said Larry Curl, Wayne Township deputy fire chief.
''It looked like it was exploding from the inside. There was a sheet of flame, then an explosion,'' said Shirley Heaton, an employee at Indiana National Bank, across the street from the Ramada Inn.
Lori Leisen, secretary for H.L. Yoh, a technical service firm across the street from Bank One, said: ''I saw something real big and dark come in front. I heard the explosion and saw the fireball.'' Windows of cars in the parking lot blew out from the intense heat, she said.
''There wasn`t anything we could have done. The heat was atrocious. It was a holocaust,'' she said.
City firefighters, who gathered at the airport when Teagarden radioed that he was in trouble, averted what probably would have been a greater disaster by arriving at the hotel within minutes to extinguish the flames, said Indianapolis Mayor William Hudnut.
Emergency workers late Tuesday night were still trying to account for some guests, Marion County Sheriff Joe McAtee said at a news conference. He added that it was likely these guests had checked out before the crash and had not called to notify authorities, as they have been asked to do. No more bodies were expected to be found, he said, because the hotel had been thoroughly searched several times.
Teagarden had failed an attempted instrument landing through a low cloud ceiling and apparently was heading the plane toward an open field when he bailed out.
''He came through the clouds and was making a right turn and said he would have to get out,'' Spitler said.
Shortly before 9:12 a.m., Teagarden, flying west at 31,000 feet from Pittsburgh to Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas on a proficiency cross-country training mission, notified Indianapolis air-traffic controllers that he had lost power in his single jet engine and was urgently seeking a landing site.
He was given a choice of landing at Terre Haute, 44 miles due west, or Indianapolis, 15 miles north, said James McCue, airport operations manager.
''It was up to the pilot to determine which,'' said Spitler.
Teagarden, of the 4450th Test Group Squadron at Nellis, told the tower he would land at Indianapolis, and controllers tried to guide him in, McCue said. He could not see the runway because there was an 800-foot cloud ceiling and light fog, Spitler said. Spitler said Teagarden came over the airport too high, so the control tower tried to take him around to another runway. The plane had lost too much power to complete the maneuver.
''The major made the best decision he could have made,'' said Col. Bruce L. Johnson, a senior public relations officer at Ft. Benjamin Harrison Army Base, near Indianapolis.
An Air Force source told The Tribune that, if a power failure occurs during the final landing approach, the pilot ''is only a second or two from the ground.'' ''The orders are to do what you can when you have control of the aircraft and then get out'' if control is lost, the source said.
McCue said the Vietnam-era fighter had lost its thrust and was gliding when it went down.
He speculated that the force of the pilot`s ejection from the jet could have pushed the plane down, deflecting it from its course toward open fields beyond the hotel.
''It was up to the pilot to determine which,'' said Spitler.
Teagarden, of the 4450th Test Group Squadron at Nellis, told the tower he would land at Indianapolis, and controllers tried to guide him in, McCue said. He could not see the runway because there was an 800-foot cloud ceiling and light fog, Spitler said. Spitler said Teagarden came over the airport too high, so the control tower tried to take him around to another runway. The plane had lost too much power to complete the maneuver.
''The major made the best decision he could have made,'' said Col. Bruce L. Johnson, a senior public relations officer at Ft. Benjamin Harrison Army Base, near Indianapolis.
An Air Force source told The Tribune that, if a power failure occurs during the final landing approach, the pilot ''is only a second or two from the ground.'' ''The orders are to do what you can when you have control of the aircraft and then get out'' if control is lost, the source said.
McCue said the Vietnam-era fighter had lost its thrust and was gliding when it went down.
He speculated that the force of the pilot`s ejection from the jet could have pushed the plane down, deflecting it from its course toward open fields beyond the hotel.