No Evasive Action Seen in Air Crash : Witnesses Say Neither Plane Turned Before Collision, U.S. Officials Report

The pilot of an Aeromexico DC-9 apparently had no advance warning that he was in danger of colliding with a small private airplane, and witnesses said neither aircraft appeared to turn or take evasive action before their disastrous crash 6,500 feet above Cerritos, federal officials said Tuesday.

Dr. John Lauber, who is in charge of the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation of the aerial catastrophe, said that the “common feature” of most eyewitness accounts is that “no turn or apparent evasive action was taken by either aircraft.”

He said the small plane, a Piper Cherokee Archer, apparently collided only with the horizontal stabilizer of the jetliner, rather than with the left wing of the larger aircraft, as previously believed.

Stabilizer Torn Free

The collision did, however, break the horizontal stabilizer free from the jetliner, he said.

When that stabilizer, a part of the tail section that controlled the jet’s pitch--or nose-up, nose-down movement--was sheared off in the collision, Lauber said, “. . . no control was possible.”

He said the jetliner flipped upside down and plunged to earth in that position.

Earlier in the day, Lauber had described the last moments of the Aeromexico flight, as recorded by digital computer tapes produced by the air controllers’ radar sets.

Shortly before the collision, he said, the jetliner had been warned of the existence of “traffic at 10 o’clock, one mile northbound, altitude unknown.”

Lauber said the digital tapes appear, however, to rule out the possibility that this “traffic” was the Piper.

Radar Track

He said the radar track of the Piper was “clearly plotted to the point of impact,” as was the track of the airliner.

“There were more aircraft in the general area,” Lauber said. “But the two tracks that disappear simultaneously are assumed to be those of the Aeromexico airliner and the (Piper).”

Lauber said the jetliner’s pilot acknowledged the warning about the “traffic at 10 o’clock,” and then acknowledged and began to comply with the air controller’s instruction to reduce his airspeed to 190 knots and begin a descent from 7,000 to 6,000 feet.

Then, Lauber continued, another small airplane--a “pop-up target” whose on-board transponder also was tuned to the visual flight code--appeared on the screen at 3,500 feet in another sector of the Terminal Control Area and asked for a traffic advisory.

New Code Assigned

The air controller gave the “pop-up target” a new transponder code (to identify it as an instrument-controlled flight in the area) and ordered it to make turns and altitude corrections to keep it out of the path of other aircraft.

But when the controller tried to re-contact Aeromexico 498, to order the pilot to veer left to line up with the airport’s runway, there was no response.

“He made eight attempts (at contact),” Lauber said. “But radar data shows the transponder return from the DC-9 stopped at 6,500 feet; right smack in the middle of the TCA sector.”

Lauber called the “pop-up” a “distraction” and said it “clearly occupied part of the air controller’s attention, during the time that Aeromexico was inbound.” He added that investigators have identified the airplane--and plan to question its pilot.

He said the digital readouts and voice recordings--and data now being retrieved from the jetliner’s own voice recorder and flight recorder--will be integrated later into the investigation to develop “a complete report” on exactly what happened over Cerritos, 20 miles southeast of Los Angeles International Airport.

Meanwhile, there were these developments:

Lauber said a blood sample--for drug testing--was taken Tuesday from the air controller who was handling the DC-9 at the time of the collision. But he said he had no real suspicion that drugs had in any way been involved in the crash.

Heart Attack Report

He also largely discounted early reports from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office indicating that the pilot of the Piper had suffered a heart attack just before the collision.

Los Angeles County coroner’s spokesman Bill Gold on Tuesday formally identified the pilot and passengers in the Piper as William Kramer, 53; his wife Kathleen Kramer, 51, and their daughter, Caroline Kramer, 27, all of Palos Verdes Estates.

He said the Kramers were identified by fingerprints, and added that the cause of death was listed as extensive multiple injuries, which were caused in the crash.

NTSB spokesman Ira Furman said Kramer, an executive who moved to Palos Verdes from Spokane, Wash., about a year ago, had held a private airman certificate (pilot’s license) for about six years, had more than 200 hours of flying experience and had undergone a routine flight physical examination before moving from Spokane to Palos Verdes.

At that time, he added, there appeared to be no indication of heart disease.

Furman said he had talked to independent pathologists who said there would be no way to pin down the timing of the heart attack to the few minutes between the plane’s takeoff from Torrance Airport and the collision.

Called Inexact Science

“It’s a very inexact science, apparently,” Furman said. “My sources tell me that a man could suffer a heart attack--even one as severe as the coroner’s office seems to think this one was--and not even know it for a while.

“And if he didn’t know he’d had a heart attack, he might very well have gone right on flying, assuming that he was in physical shape to do so.”

Tissue from the pilot’s heart, he said, will be sent to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology near Washington for re-examination.

Acting Los Angeles County Coroner Dr. Ronald N. Kornblum told county supervisors Tuesday that Kramer might have suffered a fatal heart attack before the two aircraft collided. But he, too, said there is no way of determining that for certain.

“The heart attack might have killed him,” Kornblum said. “But the chances are it did not. It’s possible he was dead before impact, but there is no way to say that.”

Kornblum added that it was also “possible” that the heart attack was triggered by the frightening realization that the two planes were nearing impact.

Unknown Casualties

The number of people to perish in the worst airline accident in Los Angeles history remained a mystery Tuesday.

Gold said it would be a week or more before medical examiners could identify those killed. Until then, Gold declined to confirm the estimated number of dead or news reports that the fatalities included at least seven family members holding a party in the house at the corner of Reva Circle and Holmes Avenue.

Los Angeles County Fire Department spokesman Garry Oversby also issued a statement on Tuesday saying he was misquoted about the number of dead found at the corner house.

Oversby told reporters on two occasions Monday--once in the afternoon and later at night--that 18 bodies had been recovered at the house.

However, on Tuesday he said, “At no time did myself or any of my unit inspectors or the sheriff, that I know, release or speculate on the total number of bodies, because it is very difficult and it’s only the coroner that could make that determination. “That number, as far as I’m concerned, is incorrect because that determination has to come from the coroner,” Oversby said. “We had no knowledge as to total body count.”

Fire officials also had given the address of the corner home as 13421 Reva Circle, but tax records, Cerritos city officials and the owner of the home said Tuesday the address is actually 17916 Holmes Ave.

Renting to Friend

Steven L. Stallings of Laguna Niguel said he was renting the house to Howard Yackatonpah, a close friend who worked as an employment counselor at the Orange County Indian Center in Garden Grove.

Yackatonpah married the former Sharon Starr in December and moved into the house in January, along with his wife’s two daughters from her previous marriage, Stallings said. Yackatonpah’s wife worked at Rockwell International in Downey and her youngest daughter was entering her senior year at Cerritos High School, he said.

Stallings said he last saw Yackatonpah and his wife at a Saturday night powwow at the Barona Indian reservation in North San Diego County.

Yackatonpah, a Comanche Indian and president of an Indian business association called the Golden State Gourd Society, was the lead singer during the ceremonies, which broke up at about 12:45 a.m. Yackatonpah and his wife presumably drove back to their Cerritos home at that time, he said.

The landlord discounted reports that the Yackatonpahs or their children were throwing a party as the airliner streaked to the ground and reduced the home to rubble.

Next door to the Yackatonpahs, at 17908 Holmes Ave., the crushing blow of the Aeromexico jetliner apparently killed a woman and her 4-year-old child as they were moving into the residence Sunday morning.

The house, owned by Ildefonso and Elnora Figueroa of La Mirada, was being rented to the woman and her fiance, said rental agent Gordon Stefenhagen of Excellent Property Management.

“The people that I had were just moving in on Sunday morning,” said Stefenhagen. “It was a couple with a 4-year-old girl. They signed all the papers Saturday, and they were moving in the big stuff on Sunday morning, all their furniture.

Two Possible Victims

“The husband-to-be was not in the house at the time,” Stefenhagen said, adding: “It was pretty definite that the 4-year-old girl and the lady were killed.”

Stefenhagen declined to disclose the name of the tenants, but said he was unable to contact the man as of Tuesday afternoon.

Emergency crews finally moved out of the crash area Tuesday.

“Everyone feels that they’ve done as much here as they can,” Los Angeles County Fire Department Inspector Chuck Gutierrez said as the remains of cars and homes were bulldozed into huge piles and crews began erecting chain-link fences around the lots where burned-out debris marked places where homes had once stood.

NTSB investigators, however, continued to sift through crash debris, carefully raking up all available bits and pieces of the two dismembered airplanes.

The Piper fuselage and the jet’s horizontal stabilizer were loaded onto trucks Tuesday, and Lauber said they would be taken to Long Beach Airport for study.

The stabilizer and the fuselage of the smaller airplane, he said, “contain the most information about the actual impact.”

Most of the streets near the crash site were reopened to traffic Tuesday, and authorities allowed all but a few residents who lived in the devastated residential tract on the city’s east side to move freely in and out of the area for the first time in three days.

Walt Buryn, whose home is on Felson Street, two blocks from the disaster site, said he had not been out of the neighborhood since the crash at noon Sunday.

Limited Access

Sheriff’s deputies, trying to restrict access to the area until crash investigators finished their work, warned residents who left that they would not be allowed immediately back in--so Buryn and his wife, Ziska, stayed home.

“We started running low on food,” Buryn said Tuesday. “Finally, somebody in the neighborhood made a big shopping list and we smuggled it out and eventually got a new supply of milk, bread and eggs. But it’s been damn frustrating, just sitting here waiting. Like being in a prison.”

Cerritos officials, local clergy and school administrators met Tuesday afternoon to discuss ways to help the community of 55,000 residents cope with the tragedy.

Tonight, the City Council at its regularly scheduled meeting is expected to announce a day of mourning for the city.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors ordered all flags on county buildings flown at half staff for one week and called on Congress to convene hearings in Los Angeles on air safety after reports that private aircraft often stray into the approach path to the L.A. airport.

The board ordered county lawyers to meet with NTSB and Federal Aviation Administration officials to develop regulations that would require all small airplanes to be equipped with working transponders when flying in this area.

Chief Deputy County Fire Chief Earl Fordham told the board that a final tally showed 16 homes destroyed or seriously damaged with 11 of them 90% to 100% destroyed. He assessed the property damage--not counting the aircraft--at $2.7 million.

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