Air Controller Subpoenaed in Plane Crash
An air traffic controller who may have directed a light plane onto a course that led it to crash in the San Gabriel Mountains has been served with a subpoena and will be interviewed today by investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board, the board announced Monday.
The safety board took the unprecedented action of subpoenaing the as-yet-unnamed controller after his superiors in the Federal Aviation Administration refused to allow an NTSB investigator to tape-record an interview with him.
The dispute between the nation’s top aviation safety agencies has led the board to accuse the FAA of stonewalling, and the FAA to counter that the board is grandstanding.
The crash late Thursday claimed the lives of both men aboard the single-engine Cessna 172--flight instructor Allen Hart, 24, of Florida, and student pilot August Huntschell, 22, an Austrian.
A preliminary NTSB report indicates that the plane was operating under instrument flight rules, under the direction of the Burbank Terminal Radar Approach Control, on a flight from Van Nuys to Santa Monica when it slammed into a steep canyon wall north of Altadena.
Santa Monica Municipal Airport is about 15 miles due south of Van Nuys Airport, but the plane was about 20 miles due east of Van Nuys when it crashed.
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