Controller May Have Sent Plane on Fatal Course

Preliminary investigation of a light plane crash that killed a flight instructor and his student in the San Gabriel Mountains indicates that a Burbank FAA controller may have directed the aircraft onto a course that sent it slamming into a steep canyon wall, a spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board said Friday.

The bodies of the two men were recovered late Friday afternoon by a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department helicopter. The pilot was identified as Allen Hart. No age or hometown was given. The student pilot was identified as a European, August Hentschell of Austria.

Gary Mucho, NTSB Los Angeles field office chief, said the single-engine Cessna 172 was en route from Van Nuys Airport to Santa Monica Airport on an instrument training flight and was under the control of the FAA controller at Burbank terminal radar control. He said the plane took off from Van Nuys at 7:21 p.m. Thursday and Burbank’s last radar contact with the aircraft was 13 minutes later.

He said the plane disappeared from the Burbank radar screen at that time and apparently crashed a short time later into the east side of Millard Canyon above Altadena in the Angeles National Forest, about 10 miles northeast of Burbank.

‘Positive Control’

“The aircraft was under positive control by Burbank when it vanished,” said Ira Furman, NTSB spokesman in Washington. “It was under instrument flight rules and was subject to the direction of the (FAA) controller . . . and we believe on a preliminary basis that the controller handling the aircraft put it on an eastbound course at an altitude of 3,000 feet (toward) mountains that are 5,000 to 6,000 feet high.”

Furman said controllers in the Burbank facility refused to be interviewed Friday by Don Llorente, the air safety investigator assigned to the accident, because Llorente wanted to record the informal session on tape for the sake of accuracy.

As a result, Furman said, NTSB Chairman Jim Burnett authorized late Friday the issuance of subpoenas ordering the controllers involved to appear at the board’s Los Angeles office for formal depositions early next week.

He also said an NTSB air traffic control specialist was en route to Los Angeles to investigate and review the radar plot of the fatal flight.

Barbara Abels, FAA spokeswoman in Los Angeles, issued a formal statement late Friday saying that the agency “is cooperating in the investigation of the tragic fatal crash” but added that the taping of the informal interviews were “declined” in the interests of fairness to the controllers involved.

“The FAA believes that the controllers should have sufficient time to prepare final statements for the record and have the right to have the assistance of legal counsel in any proceeding in which their involvement may be substantial,” Abels said.

She also said the FAA has asked the controllers to voluntarily submit to drug tests and they have agreed to cooperate in the administration of such tests. She said she did not know when the tests will be conducted.

Furman said drug tests are now routine in such investigations.

But he also indicated that the NTSB was most upset by the controllers’ refusal to submit to informal taped interviews.

Issued Recorders

“It is their (the investigators’) option to ask that (such) an interview be recorded. Investigators are issued tape recorders . . . it (the recorder) isn’t a cattle prod.”

He said formal depositions are not an adequate substitute for informal interviews “because they delay the investigation.”

A veteran flight instructor who works out of Burbank Airport said the most mysterious aspect of the accident was the report that the Santa Monica-bound plane crashed so far to the east of its intended destination.

“It is quite puzzling as to how a pilot flying instrument flight rules from Van Nuys to Santa Monica could possibly wind up in those mountains,” he said. “That’s really a strange place for him to wind up.”

He said he and other veteran colleagues that he had spoken to would require much more information before speculating on how the Cessna might have been directed into the mountainside canyon.

Radar Screen

The search for the plane was started minutes after it disappeared from the radar screen but was called off because of darkness. The wreckage was sighted shortly before 9 a.m. Friday by a Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department helicopter.

The Cessna struck a steep, brushy slope on the east side of Millard Canyon north of Altadena, according to Capt. Norm Batterson of the Altadena Mountain Rescue Team.

He said at least two other light-planes have crashed within a mile of the same spot within the past two decades.

Three members of Batterson’s team, accompanied by a sheriff’s emergency service deputy trained as a paramedic, reached the wreckage about 11 a.m., lowering themselves about 1,000 feet down the steep canyon with ropes.