Pilot Averts Tragedy by Crashing Plane Through Office Building Window

A single-engine airplane taking off from Meadowlark Airport lost power and crashed into a Huntington Beach office building Saturday, but the four people aboard suffered only minor injuries when the pilot flew the Cessna through a second-floor window.

“If it had been a solid wall, we’d be dead,” said passenger William Perry White, 28, of Huntington Beach as he left the scene to drive his wife, Roseann, 29, also a passenger, to the hospital for a treatment of her splinted and bandaged left arm.

‘An Exceptional Job’

A flight instructor at the aviation company that owns the Cessna 172 credited the pilot with “an exceptional job” of maneuvering the plane into the roughly 8-by-15-foot window and avoiding a more serious accident.

The pilot, James Parr, 45, of Huntington Beach told police that he “tried to fly it through the window to minimize injuries,” said Sgt. Michael Biggs.

Parr suffered a cut on his forehead and was taken by ambulance to Humana Hospital Huntington Beach, where he was treated and released. In addition to the Whites, who were also treated and released at Humana, the third passenger was Parr’s son, Doug, 16, who appeared to have suffered cuts on his knees.

After the accident, which occurred shortly after 11 a.m., the four were helped out of the airplane and away from the building by people who had rushed over from the perimeter of the airport after hearing the crash, Biggs said. “They all walked out on their own power,” he said.

Although the plane had two full tanks of fuel, there was no fire, Biggs said.

The Cessna crashed into the corporate offices of Renal Specialties Inc., which operates a kidney dialysis training center. The offices are in a complex of four two-story wood-and-glass buildings under the takeoff pattern of the small, private airport.

Only Tail, Wings Visible

Only the tail and folded-back wings of the four-seat, white plane were visible from outside the building. The fuselage was neatly tucked into the building.

“It looks like something out of Universal Studios,” said one policeman at the scene.

It was “very fortunate there was nobody in the building and also the speed of the plane was such that the crash didn’t kill anybody,” Lt. Tom Patton said.

There was no estimate of damage, but Biggs said that the plane “wiped out” at least two walls inside the building.

The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating the crash.

In a brief interview before he drove his wife to the hospital, passenger White said that he and his wife had met the pilot earlier Saturday at Ray-Jean Bull Aviation, located near the runway, and arranged for the flight. “We were just going for a ride,” he said.

“We took off and the next thing, we crashed,” White said. “There was no warning.” He said the engine suddenly went quiet.

He said the impact was severe. “We all got bounced around” and it was difficult to get out because the door was damaged.

“I’m happy to be alive,” White said.

Police said that all four aboard were wearing their seat belts.

The airplane is registered to Marvin and Ardine Grimmett, doing business as Ray-Jean Bull Aviation of El Toro, police said. A spokesman for the company said that the plane had been rented to Parr.

Murray Cohen, a flight instructor at Ray-Jean Bull Aviation’s Meadowlark Airport office, a couple of hundred feet from the crash site, said that Parr “did an exceptional job in picking a place to put it down.”

Tragedy Averted

If the pilot had attempted to land on top of the building, it would have “skipped off” and crashed into the ground or into nearby street traffic, Cohen said. If the pilot had crashed into the building “a few feet higher or lower,” the fuselage would have hit and possibly caught fire, he said.

The aircraft, a 1980 model, had been in San Francisco until last week, when it was moved to Meadowlark, Cohen said.

“Apparently the pilot told one of the people that he intentionally went through the window as opposed to hitting a block building,” said Huntington Beach Fire Department public information officer Martha Werth. “Sometimes in plane crashes the people walk away. It’s just luck, the way the plane crashes,” she said.

Lee Parker, an investment counselor, said that he was working in his second-story office in a building about 50 feet away from Renal Specialties Inc. when he heard the crash.

Heard the Crash

“You get tuned into the sounds of the planes” flying low over the building, said Parker, owner of Leland A. Parker and Associates. “I heard a plane taking off, and simultaneous with the sound of the motor stopping, I heard a crash and falling glass.”

He ran out of the building and “heard someone yelling, ‘My father’s bleeding! My father’s bleeding,’ ” Parker said. People ran over from the airport to help and had to break the ground-floor window door “to get the people out before there was a fire,” he said.

Parker said that if the plane had hit his building in the same corner, “it would have landed in my office. . . . I’ve been here for a year and a half and I’ve often speculated what would happen if one hit my office.”

The crash has revived longstanding concerns about the safety of the busy little airport, Huntington Beach Mayor Ruth Bailey said Saturday.

Issue of Airport Safety

“You know the runway is just not long enough,” she said. “This is the second (plane crash at Meadowlark) in the last couple of months. . . . I think we’re going to have to take a look at the safety of it and have the FAA come in and investigate.”

Bailey said that she would be discussing Meadowlark’s safety Monday night at the City Council’s regular meeting with the city Airport Commission. In the airport’s approximate 30-year history, various City Councils have complained of airport noise, the safety of planes landing at night and of small planes flying at low altitudes over nearby homes.

Still, Bailey noted, “through the years, the different councils have allowed building to go on around it. I don’t know what they were thinking at the time.”

Bailey said that she could not recall a fatal accident at the airport but, she added, it may be only a matter of time before that occurs.

‘A Short Approach’

Because other Orange County airports are so crowded, “we might have a difficult time trying to close this one down,” she said. But “if there’s no way of lengthening the runway, there ought to be more thought to what we can do.”

About three years ago, Bailey recalled, she landed at the small airport with a friend who was a pilot and “he said he didn’t want to do that again. It’s the approach. It’s a short approach.”

A year ago a pilot was slightly injured when his rented Beechcraft 180 Sundowner crashed through a wooden fence and into four cars in a parking lot as he tried to land at Meadowlark Airport.

In June, 1983, a small plane attempting to land crashed into two unoccupied houses next to the airport, injuring the pilot and a passenger and barely missing children playing on nearby streets. A month earlier, the pilot of a 1940 single-engine biplane was forced to land his craft on Pacific Coast Highway in Seal Beach minutes after he took off from Meadowlark.

Past Mishaps

In May, 1982, a single-engine airplane crashed into a vacant mobile home about 50 feet away from the airport.

Two planes collided on the airport’s runway in May, 1981, and two people suffered minor injuries. In November, 1970, a pilot suffered a broken nose when his two-seater airplane overshot the runway and came to a rest with its propeller jammed through the wall of a bar.

Three people were injured when a single-engine plane overshot the runway and crashed into a Quonset hut in August, 1977. In 1972, three people escaped injury when their light plane crashed in an open field moments after taking off from Meadowlark Airport.