Group Forms After Cerritos Tragedy : Citizens United for Flight Safety Takes Off, but Slowly

These days I find myself driving down the street staring up at airplanes. When I see an airplane, I automatically look up and watch it. It’s senseless, useless, but I just can’t stop myself. It’s almost like an obsession . . . . But my real obsession now is flight safety. I feel if I can do something constructive about it, we can make some good come of this tragedy. -- Denise Guzman, victim of the Aug. 31 midair plane crash over Cerritos.

Denise Guzman does not want people to think she’s “just some hysterical victim trying to make noise,” but she does want people to take her seriously about CUFFS, Citizens United for Flight Safety, an organization formed two weeks after the Cerritos air disaster that took 82 lives.

Guzman and her husband, Steve, lost five members of their family in the crash and have joined with other Cerritos residents whose relatives were killed in the crash to go public with their new citizens’ action group.

Group Wants Action

The CUFFS slogan is: “We need Protection. We need Safety. We WANT Action.”

“Whenever anybody loses family members in a tragedy, you have to look for the good in it,” Guzman said. “But I can’t see any good coming out of this unless some changes are made to make the skies safer. You know a thing like this can happen anywhere, anytime. One of the problems here in California, though, is that there are more airplanes flying in and out of our airports than anywhere else in the country. There are more pilots and more planes here than anywhere else.”

Guzman points out that on Dec. 26, two small planes collided over the ocean off Long Beach, but both pilots managed to land their aircraft safely. And earlier in December there were two near misses over Southern California skies, one at the Long Beach airport on Dec. 11 when a commercial airliner had to climb out of another one’s way to avoid a collision; the other on Dec. 14 near John Wayne Airport in Orange County.

“The Orange County one was like the Cerritos one, a private plane and a commercial jet,” Guzman said. “The AirCal jet had to take violent evasive action to avoid hitting a single-engine plane in its path. They don’t even know where the little plane came from. They’re lucky it didn’t happen. If it had, it could have landed on Disneyland.”

According to a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman, the pilot of the AirCal plane with 69 passengers on board, made a verbal report to ground control at the FAA’s Terminal Radar Approach Control at El Toro Marine Base of the near miss, and said the small plane, a Cessna 172, was 100 feet away from the jet horizontally and 40 feet vertically.

“I’m sure these things have been going on a long time, but because Cerritos is so recent and still on everyone’s mind, they seem to be making people more aware of near misses,” Guzman said.

Guzman, a 32-year-old hairdresser from Whittier, did not start CUFFS, but recently became its president and chief spokesperson.

Founder’s Family

The group was founded by Carol Palmieri, who lives two blocks from where the jet crashed into Cerritos homes. The Palmieri family escaped injury.

“I went to one of their meetings and asked what kind of group they intended to have,” Guzman explained. “They said that they planned to meet once a week and write letters to California legislators and congressmen about increasing flight safety measures. I said I wasn’t interested in that. I said I wanted to do more--go public with the organization. I told them ‘I’ll become president if you let me take the group in the direction I want to go.’ Everybody said that was fine with them.”

“Denise came to one of our meetings and we definitely agreed with her that we should go public,” said Palmieri, who works for the ABC (Artesia, Bellflower, Cerritos) School District as a receiver in its main warehouse).

“I founded the group with some neighbors and friends because I was hoping to get a lot of people concerned like I am that it’s important to do something about air safety,” added Palmieri, CUFFS treasurer. “I don’t know anything about airplanes. I fly in them; they fly above me. But I do know that something like Cerritos should never have happened in this age of such high technology. The safety systems are available. We just have to get important people to do something about requiring them. We can put men on the moon. We can make the skies safe.”

According to Guzman, CUFFS now has 83 members, “and the more people hear about us, the more calls we get. It’s a matter of the public being aware of the issues and of the organization. Recently we’ve been getting a lot of calls and even donations. I think all these recent air disasters are making people realize it’s going to happen again. But this takes a lot of time. You have to take so much time away from your family and your business. And there’s so much expense to get it going.”

The new group has a new address, P.O. Box 3875, Cerritos, Calif. 90703, but Guzman uses the number of her beauty shop in Norwalk for phone inquiries: (213) 863-3471.

“I talked with Candy Lightner (the founder of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers--MADD--that has become an international organization) and she told me not to be discouraged with having small numbers at first,” Guzman said.

“She said when she started MADD after her daughter was killed, only eight people showed up for the first meeting. And look now how far she has gone with it. We hope to do the same thing, take our case to the public. If we can get some of the National Transportation and Safety Board recommendations implemented, then we feel our families’ lives won’t have been wasted. And we will also have accomplished some purpose for families of other air travelers.”

Trip’s Tragic Ending

Steve Guzman’s father, Manuel, his uncle Joe Guzman, cousin Robert, uncle Frank Corella and cousin Mark were killed in the Aeromexico DC-9 as they were returning from a fishing trip to Loreto on the Gulf of California in Baja. The jet, which was approaching Los Angeles International Airport, fell from the sky after colliding with a light plane.

Ironically Steve Guzman had planned to take their 13-year-old son, Phillip on the fishing trip, but decided at the last minute not to go because the family had recently returned from a vacation in Hawaii and had business to attend to. The Guzmans also have a daughter, Gina, 10, and sons Shane, 8, and Aaron, 2.

As a sales representative for the family furniture business, Steve Guzman has to fly a lot in his job and his family often takes long-distance vacations that require them to fly.

“But I would prefer to pay a couple dollars more and be safe,” he said. “If I can’t do that, what do I do? I pay $13.95 every time we fly for flight insurance. But that still doesn’t make us safe.

“This has been a hard thing to accept, the way it happened,” he added. “Usually people get sick and are in the hospital and they die. In this, there was not even all of the person left.”

Legal Battle Begins

Since the crash, the Guzman and Corella families have filed lawsuits, as have all the other families involved, those of passengers and those of Cerritos residents who lost family members when the jet crashed into their homes.

The Guzmans said that before the tragedy struck, neither of them knew much about air traffic or air safety, but they are learning fast.

“I’ve never been involved in anything like this before,” Denise Guzman said. “I didn’t know anything about air traffic safety and I never wrote a speech before, but I’m determined to get this going. I go to the hearings and a lot of their terminology goes over my head, but I’m reading a lot of reports and educating myself.”

She attended several hearings of the National Transportation and Safety Board in early December at the Crown Plaza Hotel near LAX and talked privately with a couple of NTSB representatives.

“You listen to all the testimony and find out how it shouldn’t have happened and could have been been prevented and you feel the hurt again,” Denise Guzman said. “Then you have to go through that all over again.”

Last on the Agenda

On Dec. 5, as president of CUFFS, Denise Guzman spoke at Sen. Pete Wilson’s and Rep. Glenn Anderson’s air traffic safety hearing at the Hall of Administration downtown. The citizens group was the last one on the agenda that morning, after representatives of the FAA, the Department of Transportation and various pilot organizations.

Recommendations Presented

The hearing--where formal recommendations on air safety in Los Angeles County were presented by the Board of Supervisors--ran long. None of the FAA members stayed to hear what the citizens had to say, a fact that infuriated Denise and Steve Guzman.

“That was a joke,” she said afterward. “I’m appalled at the FAA response.”

Said Steve: “I hate to put anybody down, but I know this accident could have been prevented . . . Small planes have to have the right equipment. And then the main thing they need to do is develop a system that can accept all this information and traffic and the guy in the tower has to be able to control it. Accidents like Cerritos can happen anywhere. They have 700 near misses a year.”

(As of Nov. 26, 748 near misses had been reported in the U.S. in 1986 to FAA officials. In Los Angeles County during the first nine months of 1986, 19 near misses were reported: six near Long Beach Airport; six near Santa Monica Airport and seven near Los Angeles International.)

A Sheaf of Papers

Over lunch after the Wilson hearing, Denise Guzman pulled out a sheaf of papers from her now-ever-present briefcase.

“I was up until 2:30 this morning rereading all these reports,” she said. “If you look at the recommendations the NTSB made after the San Diego crash in 1978, they are almost the same things they were talking about at the NTSB hearing here today.”

The Sept. 25, 1978 midair collision over San Diego of a PSA jetliner and a small private plane killed 144 people.

“The FAA came out with an 11-point program to improve air traffic safety in San Diego in December, 1978, and they canceled in 1979,” said Denise. “What if those regulations had been implemented? Do you think we would have had Cerritos? I don’t.”

The Dec. 27, 1978 plan announced by FAA officials was wide-ranging. It called for increased radar services at 80 air carrier airports, establishing mandatory terminal control areas (TCAs) at 44 more locations and putting most of the busiest air routes above 10,000 feet under direct air traffic control.

More FAA Proposals

For additional safety equipment, the FAA proposed requiring “wider use of altitude reporting transponders by all aircraft operators and installation of collision avoidance systems in most airliners as soon as this equipment becomes available.”

Among aviation experts, the current dispute is whether TCAS-2, a collision avoidance system now being tested, or TCAS-3, a supposedly more advanced collision avoidance system that will not be available until 1991, should be mandated for commercial aircraft.

At the Wilson hearing, some experts felt the TCAS-2 should be abandoned and urged urgent completion of the TCAS-3. Others said that the TCAS-2 system should be installed as soon as the testing is finished.

In her speech at the hearing, Denise Guzman told Sen. Wilson and Rep. Anderson that CUFFS intended to present a petition to President Reagan calling for creation of an Air Safety Task Force “to examine existing laws and regulations concerning flight safety and then make recommendations as to needed change and/or stronger implementation of available technology.”

She plans to fly to Washington in March to meet with representatives of the NTSB “to discuss input from our citizens’ group and hopefully to present the petition to the President.”

Canvassing Drive Planned

“We’re doing really well with the petitions. Members have been taking them to work and out to shopping malls to get people to sign them,” Guzman said. “We’ll be going door-to-door in neighborhoods soon.”

“We simply cannot afford any less than the best effort to see that this won’t happen again,” Wilson said of the Cerritos crash. Wilson is a prospective member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation which will be evaluating the regulatory authority and financing of the Federal Aviation Administration that is up for reauthorization this year.

“I do think that the public can make a difference,” Wilson said. “As elected representatives, we would be strangely insensitive if we were not moved by the kind of thing we just heard here.”

Denise Guzman said her group plans to go nationwide. “We’ve already heard from a woman who lost her daughter in the Dallas crash (on Aug. 2, 1985),” she said. “And we’ve applied for nonprofit status so we can get contributions. I’m sure they (representatives of aviation agencies) think I’m a joke. When they ask technological questions, I can’t answer them. But I am educating myself about air safety and one day soon, I will be able to answer them.

“You have two choices in a situation like this,” she continued. “You either consume yourself with grief or you do something for others to benefit from the tragedy. I chose to do something. Our family would want it that way. Right now those guys think, ‘We’ll let this nice little girl get up there and talk and then she’ll be gone.’ Well, they better think again. I won’t be gone.”