Show Marred by Crash Ends : Aerial Tribute to Dead Pilot Staged; 225,000 Attend

The words “We salute Gossman” billowed across the blue sky over the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station Sunday, a tribute to the pilot who died along with a passenger when their plane crashed into a chapel Saturday during the 1985 Navy Relief Air Show.

Almost all of the spectators at the last day of the show Sunday had heard of the air crash that killed two aviators. Still, the theme Sunday was the show must go on.

Base spokesman Lance Cpl. Forrest Neuerburg said Sunday’s crowd totaled about 225,000--or 25,000 more than Saturday’s.

Aiola Lewis, 83, of Anaheim, for example, said she couldn’t think of a more “exciting way to spend a Sunday.” Lewis, who was “a baby when the Wright Brothers made their first flight,” said, “I’ll come here every year till I die.”

Saturday’s crash of a small private airplane, an AT-6, occurred shortly after takeoff as pilot Merrel Richard Gossman, 55, of Canoga Park, prepared to fly over the 36th annual air show at the Marine base.

“It’s what everybody doesn’t want to happen,” Lewis said. She began visiting the air show “years and years ago” with her husband, a former Marine now deceased. “He wouldn’t miss it for the world and neither will I,” she said, as stunt pilot Art Scholl and his dog, Aileron, performed a series of acrobatics high overhead.

In his a red, white and blue, single-engine “Chipmunk,” Scholl navigated a series of aeronautic rolls, loops, plummets, twists and dives, all amid streams and puffs of pink and white smoke in an otherwise flawless blue sky.

Like Lewis, Wilfred Mallard Jr., said he visits the air show, “almost every year.” Mallard, 32, a resident of Corona who grew up in Costa Mesa, remembered going to John Wayne Airport as a child “just to watch the planes take off. It was Orange County Airport then.”

“Planes,” he explained, “just turn me on.”

A Navy veteran who served aboard the aircraft carrier USS Forrester, Mallard said didn’t know how the crash happened. “It was just a shame,” he said.

Also killed in the crash was Robert G. Arrowsmith, 25, a Navy hospitalman stationed at El Toro’s medical clinic. Gossman was a former Marine flyer who also had flown for United and Aloha airlines.

The cause of the crash has not been determined, Master Sgt. Jack Michalski said. The National Transportation Safety Board is heading an investigation.

El Toro officials said the plane appeared to lose power before it hurtled into power lines, careened into a road on the base and crashed into an empty chapel, spewing debris and flames.

Gossman was a member of the Condor Squadron, a club of former fighter pilots who perform mock dogfights in vintage airplanes at air shows. Gossman’s aircraft was a World War II military scout.

On Sunday, squadron members said they hope to stage a military-style “missing man” funeral Saturday for Gossman at their clubhouse beside the Van Nuys Airport. The club is waiting for approval from his widow and the city-owned airport’s management, said the club’s founder, Richard T. Sykes.

“We want to have the whole thing--an awning on the lawn, a chaplain to read the service and a missing man flyby by all 11 of our planes,” said Sykes.

The “missing man” is a traditional funeral salute to a dead military pilot, in which a group of planes roars low overhead during the service. One plane banks away, leaving a space in the formation to represent the absence of the fallen pilot.

Gossman’s plane was specially modified for him to fly with his artificial leg. He lost his right leg below the knee at some point in the past, but how is unclear.

“He told me he was a Marine during the Korean War and stepped on a land mine,” Sykes said.

But Nick Beck of Sherman Oaks, a friend who said he met Gossman at Los Angeles City College in 1955, said Gossman told fellow members of the Gamma Delta Upsilon fraternity that he had accidentally shot himself in the leg, “in a hunting accident or something like that.”

Beck said Gossman told others in the fraternity that the loss of the leg had forced him to leave a seminary where he was studying for the Catholic priesthood, because the order did not accept candidates with physical impairments.

Sykes said the Condors wanted to carry on with the air show after the accident Saturday but the Marine Corps refused, “apparently because they thought we’d be too broken up or something to fly.”

The Condors instead flew to Shafter, north of Bakersfield, where they performed Sunday in an air show at Minter Field, “because that’s what you’re supposed to do, carry on,” Sykes said. “When we make commitments, we carry them out.”

In El Toro Sunday, the Blue Angels were scheduled as the finale of the air show.

“It’s the Blue Angels--that’s why we’re here,” said Barry Pier, of Dana Point, who stood watching with his 4-year-old son, Jason, perched on his shoulders.

Minutes later, all heads turned skyward as the world-famous, bright blue fighter jets took to the sky at speeds of hundreds of miles per hour in their renowned diamond formation, just inches of air separating the gleaming aircraft. There was no room for error.

But they were not the finale. As throngs of land-bound motorists began the long trudge back to parking lots, the skywriters appeared overhead.