Wider Probe of Plane Traffic in L.A. Urged

Another collision like the one between an Aeromexico DC-9 and a small airplane over Cerritos could happen at any time because of overcrowding and an overcomplicated control system in Los Angeles airspace, an air controller and the head of a private pilots organization said Thursday.

Air controller Anthony Skirlick and John Baker, president of the 260,000-member Aircraft Owners and Pilots Assn., held separate press conferences in Los Angeles in which they both criticized the scope of the investigation of Sunday’s crash.

“It is focused too narrowly on events just before the accident,” Skirlick said.

“You have the most complex airspace in the United States in this area,” Baker said, “and the system of regulations that deals with it has been cobbled together . . . a fix on a fix on a fix . . . until it starts to look like the Internal Revenue code.”

John Lauber, chief investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, said Wednesday that the air traffic controller who was handling Aeromexico Flight 498 does not remember seeing a radar blip from the Piper Cherokee Archer II that collided with the DC-9, although the small plane was visible on radar screens for several minutes.

Asked how the controller could fail to see the small plane, Lauber said the controller had many other things to do at the time. He said the controller had six other radar echoes on his screen when the two airplanes collided and was also handling two positions--his own and the “handoff” spot, which is responsible for turning traffic over to other control areas.

Moreover, a report from Washington on Thursday indicated that the controller’s primary radar may not have been working perfectly.

Howard Johannssen, president of Professional Airways Systems Specialists, an airport technicians union, said the set was either producing no images or only faint images of aircraft locations at the time of the crash.

However, he said, the controller’s secondary radar was working, so the problem “probably did not contribute” to the catastrophe that claimed the lives of 67 people in the two aircraft and a still undetermined number on the ground.

At a press conference Thursday night, Lauber said that he, too, had heard “second-hand reports” of problems with the Los Angeles Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) radar. But he said that subsequent examination of the system and its operations and maintenance logs disclosed that the system had been “certifiable” (fully operational) at the time of the collision and that it had been virtually “problem free” for some time.

Lauber also said the air controller who was in charge of the Aeromexico flight was “fully qualified” for his job. He said the man had been an air controller for three years and described him as 35 years old, Army-trained, retrained by the Federal Aviation Administration and additionally qualified through extensive experience--more than 1,000 hours logged--as a private pilot.

During his meeting with reporters Thursday, private pilot advocate Baker conceded that the collision probably was due to a tragic “mistake” on the part of the Piper pilot.

“I think very clearly this is a man problem,” he said. “But the complexity (of the air control system over Los Angeles) may have led the man into making the mistake.”

He said the terminal control area regulating air traffic into Los Angeles International Airport is far more complicated than similar control areas surrounding nearly every other major airport in the nation.

“And there appears to be no reason for it,” he added.

“It was gross mismanagement of the system,” Skirlick, who is trying to organize a new air controllers union to replace the one dissolved when President Reagan fired 14,000 controllers in 1981, said during his press conference.

“It could happen any day of the week, because they have too many high-speed airplanes with too many little planes flying around.

“They are using admiralty laws for planes that go 100 times faster than a boat. We shouldn’t have to have blood sacrifices to change safety practices.”

Baker said the federal government may be partly at fault in the catastrophe for having lagged behind on a planned $12-billion program to update and automate the equipment used by air traffic controllers.

That update, he said, might have ensured that the small aircraft’s altitude was clearly visible to the air controller.

Equipment Faulted

“In terms of the main-frame computers driving the air traffic system,” Baker said, “we are driving with computers that haven’t been manufactured for something like 10 years. They’re slow, they’re prone to breakdowns, they have low capacity, and the result is the controller is always operating on the raggedy edge, in the sense that the system may go down on him.”

He also pointed out that private pilot William Kramer of Rancho Palos Verdes, who was at the controls of the Piper, had recently moved to the Los Angeles area and could have become disoriented--unaware that he was in restricted airspace--at the time of the collision.

On the other hand, he pointed out, Kramer had recently “gone out and bought a new chart, so that he’d have the most current information available. He filed a flight plan, though he didn’t activate it. He checked the weather. He did everything a careful, cautious pilot might do.”

Found Near Wreckage

That new chart, purchased not long before Kramer’s final flight, was found near the wreckage of the Piper.

Lauber said Wednesday that his investigators had talked to a controller at the Torrance Airport tower whose records showed that he had checked, and passed, Kramer on his knowledge of the area and his ability to correctly interpret the chart less than a week before the fatal flight.

Lauber said that 93 witnesses have now been identified by his investigators, but of these only 15 appear actually to have seen the collision itself.

Among these collision witnesses, however, he said two had taken “highly significant photographs.” One, he said, was a Polaroid picture of the horizontal stabilizer as it fell from the sky. The other was a sequence of photographs beginning with a puff of smoke in the sky and continuing with pictures of debris descending.

Times staff writer Eric Malnic contributed to this article.