Hi there. I'm the author of the web site that you've been reading. I figured that since you've taken the time to read my site about the crash in Gander, the least I could do is tell you a little bit about myself, why I created this site to begin with, and why it continues today.

Personal

I grew up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, home of the University of Alabama, where I eventually attended college. I'm married and currently live in Birmingham, Alabama. I have a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Alabama, and an M.S. in Information Systems from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

Back in 1992, I was eating a bowl of cereal one Saturday morning and flipping around the channels as I so commonly did on Saturdays. I happened across an episode of A&E's Investigative Reports, hosted by Bill Curtis. I figured I'd see what it was about.

The show's topic was the crash of an Arrow Air DC-8 in Gander, Newfoundland in December of 1985. Two hundred and forty-eight members of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division, along with 8 crew members died in the crash. I was in middle school at time time, and vaguely remembered hearing about the crash back then. I remembered President Reagan consoling family members at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky in an emotional memorial service. It intrigued me that this crash was on Investigative Reports.

As the show went on, it laid out information about the crash, showed interviews with witnesses, and laid out a story of potential governmental cover-up during the investigation of the crash. I had not heard this angle of the story before. There was mention of how a bomb brought down the plane, how many things had gone wrong during the troops' trip back to the States, and how the investigation was poorly executed. At this point, I wanted to know more about what happened -- more than a 1 hour show could tell me

I began to do some casual searching for information. The World Wide Web was not developed to the level that it is today, and therefore very little information about the crash was available on the Web, if any. I found some articles at the University of Alabama library, and read up on the accident. During this time, I was also enrolled in my Junior year of college, and was taking a course in public speaking, and one on technical writing. One assignment in my public speaking class was to do a persuasive speech on a topic of choice; the technical writing class had an assignment which was to develop an informational paper on a topic of choice. Knowing that I would enjoy both of these assignments if the topic were interesting to me, I decided to kill two birds with one stone, and investigate the Gander crash, which could produce a speech and technical paper on the crash.

Moving right along, I did well on both assignments, and graduated. My wife and I moved to Fairfax, Virginia in order to pursue my Masters degree. When I enrolled at George Mason University in 1995, I was given the traditional "student account" there with a couple megabytes of disk space and e-mail. By this time, the Web was starting to catch on, and I figured I ought to get a web page up if for no other reason than to experiment. I didn't know HTML really well, so I found a nifty little tool that would take a Microsoft Word document and convert it to HTML. I figured I'd try that on some document I had just to see how it'd do. The first Word document I noticed on my hard drive was my paper, entitled "Gander: The Untold Story" from my technical writing class. I let the little tool convert that to HTML and voila, I had an HTML'ed document. So, I figured I'd put it on the web, announce it to some search engines, and see if anyone visited my site.

Well, boy did they visit! I got e-mails, and all kinds of contacts from people all over the place who had loved ones on the plane, some who cleaned up the crash site, and some who worked for the airline, Arrow Air. A few months later, I was called by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and did a telephone interview for the 10th anniversary of the crash. I added a guestbook to let people post comments, and that grew like crazy as well. I began to add information as it came available to me, and the site has grown bigger and bigger.

Four years and as many site revision later, you are seeing the latest effort to make information about the Gander crash available to as many people as possible, using the Internet as the medium. I've heard a lot of feedback about the previous sites I've had up, and how they were too dark, too hard to read, not accessible by certain browsers and so forth. In this revision, I have tried to make the information as accessible as possible without sacrificing, download times, and the like. I enjoy hearing from people, learning about their personal experiences, and hearing input and ideas from visitors.

However, it is my hope that one day I will be able to take this site down, for all of the information about the mysterious crash in Gander will be known, and we will no longer need to investigate and ask ourselves 'what happened'. Thanks for stopping by.

Seek the Truth.