Pilot Had ‘Trouble’ With Guide Signal Before Fatal Crash

A pilot who crashed near John Wayne Airport in fog-shrouded darkness last week had reported he was “having trouble” with the radio signal guiding him to the runway, federal investigators said Thursday.

The pilot, Newport Beach developer Walter Scott Biddle, told controllers of the navigation trouble just before he aborted his first landing approach and began a second, which ended when his plane smashed into a parking lot east of the airport and burst into flames.

Biddle, 58, chairman of Biddle Development Inc. of Irvine, died in the 8:24 p.m. crash on Feb. 26, an evening when several other private and commercial planes had made successful landings at the airport.

Biddle, who was not certified to fly with instruments during poor visibility, was nonetheless trying to make an instrument approach to John Wayne’s right runway by aligning his craft along a radio beam known as a “localizer.” By following the beam, he would have been assured of flying on a path aimed at the runway and remaining on the proper descent path.

But Audrey Schutte, investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, said Thursday that Biddle told tower controllers as he was making his first approach that he was “having trouble with the localizer” and announced his plans to go around and try again.

Controllers gave him a heading and altitude to begin a new approach, and Biddle acknowledged those instructions. He was within three miles of the airport and had been warned twice by controllers he was too low when the tower received his last voice transmission. The crash occurred about half a mile northeast of the runway, well off the normal approach course, Schutte said.

It is not possible to determine from Biddle’s report whether the trouble was in the radio beam itself or in the navigational instrument on Biddle’s plane allowing him to follow the beam, Schutte said.

The Beechcraft Bonanza was too badly damaged to examine the instrument itself. Theoretically, the localizer beam could have been interrupted briefly if a large aircraft had been crossing the runway during Biddle’s approach, temporarily blocking the localizer antenna, she said.

But Ralph Odenwald, air traffic manager at the John Wayne Airport tower, said that was unlikely. “For it to create any kind of interference, it would have to be large, and to my knowledge there were no large airplanes right in front of him,” he said.

Schutte said she has “kind of come to a dead end” in pursuing the localizer problem. “I put a little less importance on it when I found out that he was not instrument rated,” she added.

In controlled airspace, such as that around John Wayne Airport, pilots not trained in instrument navigation may fly only when visibility is at least three miles and the cloud cover no less than 1,000 feet.

On that night, however, visibility was only a little more than a mile, and there was a 400-foot cloud cover. Biddle had not taken the special Federal Aviation Administration tests required for instrument certification, so he was in violation of federal regulations in attempting to make the approach, investigators said.

Tim Collins, Biddle Development vice president and a friend of the family, said that while Biddle may not have been legally certified, “the log and the record of Scott’s flying time would, I think, show that he had substantial instrument time.”

“The final determination of his qualifications are a matter for professionals and his flight instructor to determine, and I am not qualified to make that conclusion,” Collins said.

Schutte said she still needs to interview controllers who were on duty that night and review a printout of the radar track of Biddle’s plane before making further determinations.

The radar track might help explain reports from controllers that he was actually northbound, directly opposite the direction in which he should have been traveling to land on John Wayne’s south-facing runway, she said.

“There was a report he was actually going north, indicating he possibly had already lost control, and was heading toward the accident site,” she said.