Witness Says Plane Over Ranch Nearly Hit Reagan

A Secret Service agent has testified that a light plane flew so close to President Reagan’s helicopter last August while Reagan was aboard that there would have been a head-on collision if the President’s pilot had not taken evasive action at the last second.

“They were heading straight toward each other,” said Agent George A. Kurutz, who witnessed the incident while on duty at Reagan’s Rancho del Cielo last Aug. 13.

The testimony came during a National Transportation Safety Board hearing into the incident that prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to revoke the flying certificate of the light plane’s pilot, Ralph W. Myers, 33, an Army private stationed at Ft. Lewis, Wash. The hearings began Thursday at the Federal Building in Hawthorne.

Emergency Powers

The FAA invoked its emergency powers to revoke Myers’ license on Aug. 14 after a two-day investigation of the incident. The action prohibits Myers from piloting a plane for at least a year.

Myers, who was AWOL from the Army at the time of the incident, sought the hearing to get his license back.

Allan Horowitz, an FAA attorney from Washington, said Myers’ certificate was revoked not only because he was violating a prohibited airspace, but also because he was flying with out-of-date air charts and carrying a commercial passenger without an FAA certificate to do so.

“This is a unique case,” said Horowitz in his opening argument before Administrative Law Judge Jerrell R. Davis. There have been other incidents for which the FAA has penalized pilots who violated the airspace over Reagan’s ranch, but FAA attorneys believe this was the first time the space was breached while the President was in the area.

Rented Airplane

According to FAA documents and testimony of investigators, Myers rented a white Piper Archer in Vancouver, Wash., and then flew to Lompoc, where he picked up Harlan Lee Jones. He then flew to John Wayne Airport in Orange County, where Jones had a business meeting with Donald Nixon Jr., nephew of the former President.

Government officials who have investigated the case made it clear that they do not believe Myers was intentionally attempting to harm Reagan.

Myers’ attorney, Mark Goldstein of Newport Beach, told the hearing he would prove that Myers was not involved in a near-collision with Reagan’s helicopter, and that in fact Myers might not have been in the restricted airspace at all.

That space is about three miles square and rises to an altitude of 4,999 feet when the President is at the ranch and to 4,000 feet when he is not. Kurutz and another agent, John D. Trent, estimated that Myers’ plane came within a few hundred feet of the President’s helicopter before its Marine pilot banked away from it and landed.

“There may have been substantial fault on both sides,” Goldstein said.