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A C-141A Starlifter makes a test flight over Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., in 1965. (U.S. Air Force Photo)

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Capt. Gregory M. Cindrich

Air Force Pilot Was One Of Eight Killed On Return From Humanitarian Mission

By Bethanne Kelly Patrick
Military.com Columnist

Capt. Gregory M. Cindrich was proud of his work as an Air Force pilot, and "especially proud of several humanitarian missions," according to his Air Force Academy classmate Capt. Eric Siegrist. These included medical evacuations of bombing victims from the Khobar Towers explosion and a survivor of the Air Korea crash in Guam.

It is no small irony that Cindrich lost his life while returning from another humanitarian mission. On Sept. 13, 1997, after delivering a mine-clearing team to Windhoek, Namibia, he and his eight fellow C-141 crew members were struck head-on by a German Luftwaffe TU-154 off the African coast. After a 13-day multinational search-and-rescue effort, the American crew was declared dead.

Cindrich was so committed to his lifelong dream of flying that he turned down several scholarships before receiving his Air Force Academy appointment. After his 1991 graduation, Cindrich completed several assignments and his MBA while awaiting his cockpit, which he gained in 1995 with the 15th Airlift Squadron at Charleston Air Force Base, N.C. By that time he had married and had a son and was, by all accounts, devoted to his young family.

Since Cindrich's death, his wife Monica has returned to Washington, D.C., again and again on behalf of her husband and his comrades. After three investigations of the incident, examiners determined that the German plane was flying at the wrong altitude. The American personnel did not die on impact. They lived, in full realization of what was happening, for almost 30 seconds -- a time that must have seemed to them both too short and too long.

Monica Cindrich enlisted government allies like Sen. Chuck Robb, D-Va., and Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., to help her lobby the German government for reparations. "I believe you can either sit back and complain and let yourself die inside, or make the political process work for you," she says. She continues to work for changes to air traffic safety and for awareness of accidents like the one in which Cindrich lost his life.

In 1998, the courtyard of the U.S. Embassy in Namibia was dedicated "Starlifter Courtyard" in memory of the downed C-141 crew. Monica Cindrich and her son were there, to remember a husband and father whose "upbringing and faith gave him values and hope and molded him into a person worth emulating," as Siegrist wrote.