Plane Crash Is 4th Mishap Tied to Same Firm This Year

An incident last week in which a pedestrian was killed by an airplane making an emergency landing on a busy Los Angeles street was the fourth time this year that a plane rented out by a Hawthorne-based company has crashed or was forced to land because of reported mechanical problems, FAA officials said Monday.

A spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration said the agency is examining aircraft maintenance records kept by the company, Hawthorne Aviation, for possible clues to explain the rash of accidents.

“The number of incidents in themselves are such that we are looking very closely at maintenance procedures at Hawthorne Aviation,” FAA spokesman Russ Park said.

Hawthorne Aviation’s owner, identified by an employee as Paul Gundersen, declined to return repeated telephone messages left by The Times at his office.

The most recent incident involving one of the company’s planes occurred Wednesday when private pilot Suk Hung Tsang, 31, of Los Angeles attempted an emergency landing in a single-engine Rockwell Commander 112.

Tsang, who has held a pilot’s license since May, 1985, told investigators that the airplane lost power as he was preparing to land at Hawthorne Municipal Airport. The plane came down at 6:02 p.m. at the busy intersection of 120th Street and Vermont Avenue, about two miles directly east of the airport. The plane hit a pedestrian, Monroe E. Fuller of Los Angeles, and slammed into a car driven by Ernesto Figueroa, also of Los Angeles, before coming to a stop.

Both Figueroa, 27, and Fuller, 22, were taken to Martin Luther King General Hospital where Fuller died a short time later. Figueroa remained hospitalized in stable condition Monday with facial fractures, according to a hospital spokeswoman.

Minor Injuries

Tsang was treated for minor injuries at Memorial Hospital of Gardena and released.

Park said that over the past 12 months, two other planes rented from Hawthorne Aviation have been destroyed in crashes that may have been mechanically related. Both crashes remain under investigation.

One of the incidents occurred upon landing at Montgomery Field in San Diego; the other happened in Riverside, when a “fuel problem” led to a power loss, Park said.

A third plane rented out by Hawthorne Aviation suffered a magneto failure in flight and was forced to land at Las Vegas, Park said. Still another plane rented from the company and flown to Compton was later found to have water in its fuel.