Aircraft crashes kill six in Italy
     ROME - November 22, 1997 1:59 p.m. EST - Six people were killed
 in two air crashes in Italy, one involving a medical helicopter,
 police said on Saturday.
     Rescue workers said they had found the charred bodies of a pilot,
 a doctor, a nurse and a patient amid the remains of the helicopter
 which crashed on Friday in a rocky valley near the southern coastal
 city of Salerno.
     The helicopter, which was carrying 69-year-old Vincenzo Petro-
 cello from the small village of Polla to a hospital in the neigh-
 bouring town of Vallo della Lucania for an emergency brain operation,
 went missing after a few minutes in flight.
     On Saturday, a small recreational plane nosedived into a river
 in the northeastern Abruzzo region, 10 minutes after take-off,
 killing the two people on board, police said.
     They said the victims, who both held pilot's licenses, radioed
 to say they had lost their direction because of poor visibility
 minutes after taking off from Pescara airport.
     Salerno police superintendent Graziano Gravina said heavy fog
 had probably caused the medical helicopter to crash into rocks and
 then fall into the valley below.
     "The impact was frontal and the cabin, which was already half-
 destroyed by hitting the rocks, probably immediately set on fire,"
 he said.
     Some 300 police officers, fire fighters, foresters and rescue
 workers had searched the wooded, mountainous coast around Salerno
 throughout the night on Friday and into Saturday before finding
 the wreckage.
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       Skydivers' pilot killed as plane crashes near Rotterdam
     ROTTERDAM - November 22, 1997 1:35 p.m. EST - The pilot of a
 light aircraft was killed Saturday when his plane crashed near
 Rotterdam, but it appeared his skydiver passengers had used their
 parachutes to jump to safety, police said.
     Another person was injured and was taken to hospital in stable
 condition, said police spokeswoman Kristal Willems at the crash
 site near the small town of Rhoon, just to the south of Rotterdam.
     "The pilot is confirmed to be dead," she said.
     The four other skydivers who were aboard the plane when it left
 nearby Rotterdam Airport shortly before the crash were in shock but
 otherwise unhurt.
     "It looks as though the parachutists jumped from the plane,
 which was a couple of miles away from its intended drop-zone. No
 one was on the plane when it hit the ground," she said.
     Willems said aviation experts were going over the wreckage of
 the single-engined Cessna 206 but could not give any details about
 what caused the crash.
     The pilot had been found dead on the roof of a warehouse near
 the crash site but it was not clear whether he had been wearing a
 parachute, she said.
     "The plane is upside down in a potato field about 30 metres
 from a farmhouse," said Reuters photographer Jasper Juinen. "It
 looks from the site like it flipped over after hitting the ground,"
 he added.
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