Nestande Would Act on Firms Doing Poor Plane Maintenance

In the wake of a series of private plane crashes, including one that killed singer Rick Nelson and five members of his entourage, Supervisor Bruce Nestande on Monday sought an investigation to determine whether aircraft maintenance businesses can be evicted from John Wayne Airport if they are negligent.

“With the flurry of accidents we’ve had lately, I’ve been asking this question for a long time: What can we do to protect the public from unsafe airplanes?” Nestande said. “As far as I’m concerned, if they’re found to be negligent they should be out in the street. They should not be operating here in Orange County.”

Nestande said his request was prompted in part by reports that an Orange County firm, UCO Air, had done recent maintenance work on Nelson’s DC-3, which crashed in flames near DeKalb, Tex. Friends and relatives of some of the dead band members have said the 40-year-old aircraft had been beset by engine trouble for several months, prompting one of them to file a wrongful death suit against owners of the aircraft and an aircraft service firm other than UCO Air.

Letter to Manager

“Initial reports of the . . . crash appear to raise concerns as to whether this leased aircraft was properly maintained and whether this may have contributed to the accident,” Nestande said in a letter to John Wayne Airport Manager George Rebella.

“At various times, UCO worked on that plane,” Nestande added in an interview. “I’m not for a moment suggesting their involvement in (the crash). They weren’t even part of the lawsuit. But all of this knowledge and all of these things that have occurred, I want to know what we can do.”

Vern Hickey, director of maintenance at John Wayne’s Tallmantz Aviation, said he would welcome increased supervision by the county.

“There’s more borderline airplanes on this airport than anyplace I ever worked at,” he said, referring primarily to privately owned aircraft parked at the north end of the airport which are maintained by private mechanics. Often, he said, airplane owners go to mechanics who charge cheaper rates but who may not do adequate inspections.

“You have mechanics up there working out of the trunk of their car,” Hickey said. “I can’t understand how the airport lets them get by with that. Most airports do not. Most airports if I went in as a mechanic to work out of the back of my car, they’d chase me out of there.”

Installed New Engine

Cliff Taber, director of maintenance at UCO Air, said the company’s only involvement with the Nelson plane, based off and on at John Wayne Airport for a period of several months, was a new engine installed over the summer.

“We had some familiarity with the engine and with the airplane. It was one of those things; it was broke, we fixed it and got away from it. We weren’t responsible for the daily maintenance. The pilot pretty well took care of that,” Taber said.

He said the two-engine, propeller-driven DC-3 was “a pretty good airplane . . . it’d been fairly well taken care of,” but it had repeated problems nonetheless.

“It let them down in a lotta ways, and a lot of times he (the pilot) wouldn’t fly it. They had a lot of cancellations because they couldn’t get certain things fixed, but they had trouble getting things fixed because it was hard to get parts,” he said.

The pilot of the plane, Brad Rank, often kept the plane at John Wayne Airport because it was near his home in Dana Point, although the plane was normally based at Chino, several airport officials said.

Rank, 34, and co-pilot Kenneth Ferguson, 40, survived the crash but remained hospitalized this week.

National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Brad Dunbar said Monday it will be several months before the cause of the crash is determined, though investigators have concluded that the aircraft already was in flames when it landed in the Texas field.

Full maintenance records on the airplane have not yet been reviewed by federal investigators, Dunbar said. The safety board learned only last week that Nelson was the owner of the plane, Dunbar said, having recently acquired it from Century Equipment Co., previously reported as owner of the aircraft.

In his letter Monday to airport manager Rebella, Nestande asked for a legal review to determine whether the county can terminate its leases with businesses at John Wayne Airport if operators are found to be negligent in maintaining planes.

“Regardless of the outcome of the investigation of this (the Nelson) incident, it seems to me that the county ought to take every step to assure that it is doing business with quality fixed-base operators who maintain the highest professional standards with respect to air safety,” Nestande said.

“This safety issue concerns not only those flying in aircraft serviced by our (businesses), but all Orange Countians. Our skies are saturated with aircraft, and our lands are saturated with homes, schools, businesses and other urban activities. Recent crashes within Orange County of general aviation aircraft into homes and commercial buildings can only heighten our concern for safety and proper maintenance for general aviation aircraft both based at and visiting JWA,” Nestande wrote.

One problem, said Hickey of Tallmantz Aviation, is that the Federal Aviation Administration does not have adequate manpower to supervise inspections and repair work done at maintenance facilities, nor does it do routine inspections to determine that planes are airworthy.

Annual Inspections

(All private airplanes must be inspected at least annually by an FAA-licensed mechanic, and those used for commercial purposes must be inspected by an FAA designee after every 100 hours of flight.)

“Our FAA nowadays does not inspect anything until after it crashes,” Hickey complained. “They don’t make spot checks. . . . It’s amazing the condition people’s airplanes will be in, and they don’t know it unless it falls out of the sky.”

Taber of UCO Air agreed there is a problem with private mechanics working on planes parked at John Wayne Airport, but he predicted there would be fewer mechanics with increasing insurance rates and damage awards in plane crashes.

But it would be difficult for airport officials to regulate maintenance practices because the FAA handles that, Taber said. “I guess if they could prove it (negligence) it would be OK, but it would be hard for them to legislate against it unless the FAA came down on a business.”

Ben Colee, maintenance chief at Martin Aviation, said the FAA already is “doing a good policing role” in supervising aircraft maintenance. “I know they’re in here every couple of weeks looking us over,” he said, adding that airport officials should, however, consider exercising more authority over private mechanics.

A number of pilots at the airport have in the past, however, resisted efforts to keep private mechanics out of the airport. Plane owners assert that airport maintenance firms simply want to keep their rates high and force all plane owners to use their mechanics. Even private mechanics must be licensed by the FAA, they note.

Rebella said Monday that he is asking the county counsel to review leases with airport businesses to determine whether the county could legally evict a business found negligent either by the FAA or by the courts, perhaps after a due process hearing.

“The FAA licenses (airport businesses), and I have some questions as to whether we have the ability to take any action against some (businesses) in an area already regulated by the FAA,” Rebella said.