2 County Dentists Found Dead in Crashed Plane

The bodies of two Orange County dentists were found Saturday in the wreckage of their single-engine plane, which had crashed into a mountainside in Kern County during a 100-m.p.h. windstorm.

Pilot Jean Paquette, 47, of Anaheim and passenger Claude Caperton, 56, of Brea were flying a Cessna 182 over the Tehachapi mountain range from Chino to Bakersfield on Friday afternoon when high winds forced their plane down, Col. Bob Fowler of the Civil Air Patrol said Saturday.

“The pilot radioed that he was getting a down draft pulling him down at 200 feet a minute,” Fowler said. “He got out of it and pulled up to 6,000 feet, then hit another down draft.”

The pilot’s last radio call came at about 3:20 p.m., according to Dick Hallen, regional duty officer of the Federal Aviation Administration. Five minutes later, the aircraft fell to 5,700 feet and disappeared from the radar screen at the Bakersfield airport, Fowler said.

Fowler said the plane’s electronic locater transmitter went off soon after that. He said that by 4 p.m., the CAP received a report of a missing aircraft.

The search was delayed, however, because winds were gusting at up to 100 m.p.h., preventing CAP rescue planes from flying near the crash site.

The plane was found early Saturday morning, Kern County Sheriff’s Deputy Bob Yoon said. He said the two men were dead at the scene.

Fowler said that the two were flying in the proper air corridor to the Bakersfield airport but that planes had frequently crashed in the area because of the unpredictable air currents. “This is a little more precarious than just the normal mountainous area,” he said.

The passenger’s daughter, Lynn Caperton, 30, said her father had been flying for 30 years and was a private flight instructor in his free time. “He loved flying better than anything in this life . . . ,” she said. “He belonged to a group called the Flying Dentists, and they were all very good, very experienced pilots.”

Caperton is survived by his former wife, Chris Caperton, 59, of Placentia and by three daughters and one grandson, all of Texas. Paquette’s relatives said they were too upset to speak Saturday.