1 Killed, 3 Hurt in Crashes of 2 Light Airplanes

One man was killed and three people were injured in two crashes of light airplanes early on New Year’s Day. One plane crashed next to the San Dimas house of the pilot’s sister and the other landed upside-down in a San Fernando Valley cornfield.

The pilot in the San Dimas crash was arrested on suspicion of flying under the influence of the drug PCP, authorities said.

The other crash, in which one was killed, involved a Korean War-vintage airplane carrying two men that went down in the Sepulveda Basin shortly after taking off from Van Nuys Airport about 8:30 a.m. Thursday, investigators said.

Witnesses said the single-engine T-28 trainer, a North American Aviation design that first flew in 1949, lost power, then turned sharply and tried to make an emergency landing in an empty field south of Victory Boulevard near Hayvenhurst Avenue.

Pilot Treated

The aircraft bounced several times and flipped over, breaking apart and killing the passenger, identified by the Los Angeles County coroner’s office as Albert Mikael-Fard, 28, of Northridge.

The pilot, Jeffrey Kertes, 45, of Santa Monica, was taken to Rancho Encino Hospital for treatment of minor injuries and was released. His mother, Evelyn Kertes, said her son is a professional pilot and flight trainer with at least 18,000 hours of flying time.

Federal Aviation Administration duty officer Richard Hallen said the plane, whose ownership is unclear, apparently was practicing touch-and-go landings at the airport. He said the accident is being investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board.

Kertes was involved in a similar accident--over an unplanted field in the Sepulveda Basin--in April, 1985. The engine of his two-passenger biplane quit at 4,000 feet and he was forced to make an emergency landing--that time without injuries.

In Thursday’s accident, “he lost power completely,” said James Tatum, a maintenance worker in nearby Balboa Park. “It was just ‘Bam!’ and we saw a big cloud of dust.”

A jogger, psychologist John Blanche, said the pilot “made a decent landing, but . . . the wheels caught and the whole thing just tipped over.”

Marks in the field suggest that the front landing gear got caught in a rut, causing the plane to flip, Los Angeles police said.

Police said passers-by gathered immediately and helped extricate Kertes by joining forces with officers to lift one wing of the overturned aircraft.

Surprise Visit

The second crash involved pilot Robert Gillon, 45, and his girlfriend, Delapina Magalina, 18, both of Los Angeles, who intended to pay a surprise visit to Gillon’s sister, Christine D’Angelo in San Dimas, New Year’s Day morning.

It was indeed a surprise, said D’Angelo, who was asleep with her husband and four children, ages 5 to 17, when the single-engine Cessna 152 scraped the side of their home at 1337 Camino del Sur. Awakening to a loud crash about 10 a.m., her husband, Joseph, went to investigate, only to be told by a neighbor that an airplane was wedged nose-down in the side yard.

“There was no damage to our house or the house next door, except for a scrape on the wall,” Christine D’Angelo said, adding that the plane had plowed into a dirt-banked retaining wall and had come to rest in a space no wider than eight feet. “It’s amazing, and so is the fact that those two people are alive.”

Gillon, who suffered a broken nose, and Magalina, who had a two-inch head cut, were treated at San Dimas Hospital.

At the hospital, deputies interviewing Gillon became suspicious of drug influence, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Peta Fosselman said,

$1,171 Bail

Gillon was booked at the San Dimas sheriff’s substation. He was released after posting $1,171 bail, which also covered an outstanding warrant for failure to appear on a traffic citation, deputies said.

Fosselman said the plane apparently was flying low, probably buzzing the D’Angelo house, when it hit some trees and a low wall, causing it to nose down into the side yard.

Christine D’Angelo said her brother told her he had been circling the house to give his girlfriend an aerial view before landing at a nearby airport to visit the family, when he began losing power and falling. She said he has been flying for at least 15 years.

One wing of the rented plane, which had taken off from Van Nuys Airport, was torn off, and the fuselage was broken in half, Fosselman said.

Sheriff’s Sgt. Merlyn Poppleton said both his department and federal authorities will investigate the incident.

Times staff writer Boris Yaro contributed to this article.