Pilot in Fatal Crash Was Manager of Flying Club

The pilot who was killed when his small plane crashed and burned near the border of Orange and Los Angeles counties was unofficially identified Wednesday as Glen Alan Carson, 24, of Tarzana.

Official identification of the badly charred body will await comparison with dental records, which may take several days, Los Angeles County coroner’s spokesman Robert Dambacher said.

Carson was identified by Bill Miller, a spokesman for the Century Aero Club, where Carson was manager and a founding member. The club, formed in October at Van Nuys Airport, offers flight training and safety seminars and organizes social events for its 270 members.

The cause of the crash at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday remains under investigation. National Transportation Safety Board officials have said it appears that the single-engine Cessna 210 struck a utility line before crashing and igniting a 4-acre brush fire in the Carbon Canyon area northwest of Chino Hills State Park, 150 yards inside Los Angeles County.

Talked With Carson

Scott Greene, a reporter who had flown with Carson every day for six months for LA Network, which provides air traffic reports to several Los Angeles radio stations, said he had talked with Carson by radio shortly before the plane went down.

“I’m still fairly numb,” Greene said late Tuesday night. “The first reaction I think all of us traffic reporters had in general, because we’re up there more than commercial pilots, was a reaction of complete shock.”

After Greene confirmed for himself that it was Carson’s plane that went down, he immediately stopped reporting for LA Network and flew back to Los Angeles. “I had a good cry on the way back,” Greene said.

Carson, he added, “had a lot of flying under his belt. He was an excellent pilot.”

Word of Carson’s death spread rapidly throughout Los Angeles’ tightknit community of air traffic reporters and pilots. Miller said Carson was well known in the aviation community.

“Everybody loved him,” Miller said.

Greene said Scott Bowles, another Century Aero pilot, radioed on a open frequency that he had seen Carson’s plane go down near Carbon Canyon and asked that fire trucks be sent to the area to fight the brush fire that had started.

Greene, who was flying near Pomona at the time, immediately radioed Bowles.

“I said, ‘Are you sure Glen’s gone down?’ ” Greene recalled. “And he said, ‘Yeah, it’s Glen.’ ”

Greene radioed Bob Tur, a KNX radio reporter and helicopter pilot, who picked Greene up at a Pomona airport and flew him in his helicopter to the crash site.

“We got there when the aircraft was still burning and the brush was burning,” Tur said.

The wreckage of the Cessna 210 “was thoroughly unrecognizable,” Greene added. Tur said news of the crash “just spread like wildfire through” by radio among other traffic pilots and reporters in the air at the time.

Century Aero Club

Carson, who was single, worked as full-time manager of the Century Aero Club and was a volunteer with the Van Nuys wing of the Civil Air Patrol. He was also instrumental in starting regularly scheduled FAA safety seminars at the club, members said.

Carson “was very careful and seemed to do everything by the book,” according to Tur, who once took Carson in his helicopter.

“He died doing what he loved to do, flying,” Tur said. “I’m sure he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.”