Pilot Dies as Plane Crashes in Mountains

An attempt to return a leased airplane to a New Mexico commuter airline company ended in tragedy when the twin-engine Beechcraft crashed in fog-shrouded terrain in the San Gabriel Mountains about 25 miles north of Azusa, killing the pilot, authorities said Friday.

The dead man was identified as Larry Oswald, 39, of Farmington, N.M., the chief pilot for Mesa Airlines of Farmington.

Oswald and another Mesa pilot were flying two, 14-seater Super King Air planes--which had been leased to Air L.A.--back to Farmington on Wednesday afternoon when radio contact was lost with Oswald’s plane after it left Santa Monica Airport. The other plane arrived safely in Farmington, a Mesa Airlines spokeswoman said.

Projected Route

Initially, the search for the missing plane centered along its projected route in Arizona. Also, signals picked up by a Soviet satellite led searchers to an area northeast of Phoenix, but the plane was not found there.

On Thursday morning, rescue aircraft from the Civil Air Patrol in Ontario refocused the search to rugged terrain near the 8,000-foot summit of Mt. Islip above Azusa when an emergency signal was detected there.

The wreckage was sighted late Thursday on a ridge north of Crystal Lake in the San Gabriel Mountains, but sheriff’s deputies were unable to reach the crash site until early Friday morning, a Civil Air Patrol spokesman said.

Sarah Sproul, Mesa’s vice president for marketing, said the two planes were being flown back to Farmington after Air L.A., a local commuter airline that serves desert communities in California and Arizona, decided to return them.

Serves 25 Cities

Oswald’s death came as a shock to the closely knit employees of the small New Mexico airline, which serves 25 cities in six states. He was among the first pilots hired when Mesa began operations in 1984.

“He was an excellent and skilled pilot,” Sproul said.

The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the crash.