3 Hurt When Small Plane Crash-Lands

Three people escaped serious injury Thursday evening when their single engine plane lost power, clipped a building and made a crash landing in the street near Fullerton Airport.

As he lost power while attempting to land at the Fullerton field, the pilot “tried to pick it up, but the engine did not respond,” Fullerton Fire Department Capt. Dale Weckler said.

The pilot, Jack Northrop, 51, of Whittier, lost a landing gear when his Cessna 210 hit the top of the Nutone building on Raymer Avenue, tearing a 20-foot gouge in the roof.

Clipped a Pole

Northrop then tried to land the craft about 200 yards away, according to Fullerton Fire Capt. Lou Castle, by flying over nearby railroad tracks and under a set of telephone wires. However, the tip of the left wing was sheared off by a telephone pole before he could set the craft down in the middle of Artesia Avenue, near Pritchard Avenue.

“It’s luck that it didn’t hit the (telephone) wire,” said an airport service worker standing next to the plane. “It could have blown up,” said the man, who asked not to be identified.

Northrop and two passengers--his parents--were helped from the plane by Don McGahey, 29, a carpenter who lives a few hundred feet from where the plane came to rest. McGahey and his father-in-law, Mike Bennett, witnessed the crash and called 911. Then they ran into the street to pull the three people out of the wrecked plane. “They were able to walk away from the wreck,” McGahey said.

The pilot’s parents were identified as Orville and Lyla Northrop, both 87, of Placentia.

The Northrops were taken to Martin Luther Hospital in Anaheim, where they were reported in “very stable” condition, by a nursing supervisor, who did not give her name. An emergency room nurse later said the three were released late Thursday night.

Norman Huneycutt, co-owner of the six-seat aircraft with Northrop, said his friend had been on a one-day pleasure trip to Salinas and back with his parents. He described Northrop as “an excellent pilot with well over 1,000 hours (of flight time), with a lot of time in that plane.”

There were no unusual weather conditions at the time of the crash, witnesses at the scene said.

A number of single-engine planes flying into or out of the Fullerton airport have crashed in the past three years:

On Oct. 17, 1987, a Piper Cherokee Arrow lost power, crashing into an apartment complex in Buena Park after taking off, killing the pilot, Lewis T. Hassman, of Westminster. Four apartments were destroyed in a fire caused by the crash, but there were no injuries.

On Nov. 21, 1986, a Grumman Tiger AA5, with an instructor and a student pilot aboard, experienced engine trouble on its approach to Fullerton, clipped a tree near a school and crashed onto the front lawn of a home in the 1500 block of West Fern Drive in Fullerton. The two people aboard the plane were hurt, but there were no injuries on the ground.

On June 4, 1986, Bruce Wayne, the airborne traffic reporter for radio stations KFI and KOST, was killed when his Cessna Cardinal crashed shortly after takeoff, hitting a tractor-trailer rig parked near a wholesale food warehouse half a mile east of the airport. There were no injuries on the ground. A report issued by the National Transportation Safety Board last month found that Wayne had an illegal level of alcohol in his blood when the plane crashed.

On Jan. 14, 1985, a Cessna Cardinal 177 lost power after an aborted landing at Fullerton, wedging itself between the railroad tracks and high voltage communication wires near the site of Thursday’s crash. The pilot and passenger walked away with superficial injuries, and no one on the ground was hurt.

Times photographer Kari Rene Hall contributed to this article.