It’s Plane Enjoyable to Airport Neighbors

Don McGahey had waited all week for the professional wrestling matches on television to enliven his Thanksgiving holiday.

But McGahey, who was sitting on his porch on Pritchard Avenue in Fullerton watching the pay-per-view broadcast at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, got more excitement than he thought his $14 entitled him to.

It was just then that a single-engine Cessna piloted by 61-year-old Jack Northrup crash-landed about 200 yards from his apartment, falling a few hundred feet short of Fullerton Municipal Airport’s runway.

“Damn,” McGahey recalled Friday, “the women’s wrestling had just started!”

The 29-year-old carpenter didn’t hesitate when he saw the plane crash, though.

“I come flying down the stairs,” along with his father-in-law, Mike Bennett, to rescue whoever was in the plane, McGahey said,

The passengers were Northrup’s parents, Lyla and Orville Northrup, both 87. After they had escaped the plane, McGahey said, “The pilot was going back to get (his mother’s) purse. I pulled him away and said, ‘Let’s get out of here. You’ve already got your lives.’ ”

Bennett, who had come over to watch the wrestling match, was distressed by the plane crash, McGahey said.

“I think the last words he told me was, ‘If you want to see me at your house again, you’d better move,’ ” McGahey said.

But McGahey hardly gave the incident a second thought.

“It didn’t bother me when it happened,” he said.

In fact, “it’s kind of nice living here, watching the planes and such,” he said.

McGahey said that he admires the pilots who fly the small craft.

‘They’re Kind of Neat’

“I think they’re kind of neat. I can see why people like flying them,” he said, adding that “there’s less accidents in these little planes than there are in cars.”

Some neighbors around the airport have complained about noise and safety hazards.

Others have fewer objections to the airport.

“I love the view there at night, to watch the planes land,” said Minerva Babon, 26, a mother of two. “Earthquakes scare me more than the planes do.”

Denise Havens, 28, who said she has lived near the airport since 1985, said: “My dad used to bring me here when I was a kid to watch the planes. But living here has its drawbacks. It gets scary when you see a plane sitting there in the street.”

The Fullerton airport has been the site of several crashes in its history, most recently Oct. 17, when a Piper Cherokee Arrow lost control and struck a Buena Park apartment complex.

The pilot of that plane, 64-year-old Lewis T. Hassman of Westminter, died in the crash. No one else was injured.

McGahey and his neighbors are not pilots. But their views were echoed by the pilots who fly from Fullerton’s small field.

“So far, there have been very few fatalities in the history of this airport,” said one such pilot, John Seeland, 54.

Seeland, who has been flying out of Fullerton for more than 20 years, said that “when you consider the number of accidents that will occur this weekend on the highway, aviation is an extraordinarily safe means of transportation.”

The airport’s air traffic manager, Tom Schmidt, declined to comment on the crash or his airport’s safety record.

But Northrup, the pilot, said: “There’s nothing wrong with the airport. I think they probably don’t have more crashes than any other airport.”

Northrup, a Whittier resident, and his parents, who live in Placentia, were treated at Martin Luther Hospital in Anaheim late Thursday night for minor injuries.