Plane Crashed on Man’s First Local Flight as an Instructor

The instructor who died with his student pilot when their light plane crashed in the San Gabriel Mountains last week was new to Southern California and was on his first local teaching flight, a federal investigator said Friday.

Gary Mucho, chief of the National Transportation Safety Board’s Los Angeles office, said Allen Hart, 24, recently arrived from Florida and “this basically was his first flight with a student in this area.”

He said NTSB investigators were looking into that aspect of the accident, although it was not known whether Hart or his student, August Huntschell, 22, of Austria, was at the controls of the single-engine Cessna 172 when it crashed above Altadena in the Angeles National Forest the evening of Oct. 16.

Preliminary investigation indicated, the NTSB reported soon after the crash, that a Federal Aviation Administration controller in Burbank may have been at fault by directing the plane in the direction of the mountains while it was en route from Van Nuys to Santa Monica Airport.

Routine testing, Mucho said, indicated that the controller was not under the influence of drugs. Results of tests on two other Burbank tower controllers also were negative, he said. A fourth controller refused to be tested.