The Other Shoe Dropped, Then So Did Plane

At 2,000 feet above Anaheim Hills, pilot Bob McLaurin heard the right engine of his twin-engine corporate aircraft sputter and stall.

Two to three minutes later, while over downtown Santa Ana on a course heading toward John Wayne Airport, McLaurin’s pulse quickened when he heard the left engine stop as well.

With only moments of gliding time left, McLaurin recalled Tuesday, he and two pilot friends accompanying him Monday evening in the 12-seat turboprop Fairchild Merlin IV began desperately scanning the ground for an open place in which to land.

McLaurin had to make a decision, and fast.

“I had a choice of turning right towards the Santa Ana River bed and congested areas, or left . . . towards agricultural areas east of Tustin,” said McLaurin, 52, of Corona.

Pepper Field Was Choice

Luckily for him and his passengers, as well as for residents and rush-hour commuters on the ground, he made the right choice. The impromptu landing strip turned out to be an Irvine Co.-owned bell pepper field--harvested, no less--just off the Santa Ana Freeway between Tustin and Irvine. McLaurin even managed to land perpendicular to the furrows, which helped prevent him from skidding onto the freeway.

McLaurin and his two friends, Jeffrey Johns, 21, of Perris and Tommy Pedersen, 26, of Corona, were unhurt in the forced landing. Damage to the plane’s two propellers was estimated by federal officials at $5,000 to $10,000. Officials of the Santa Margarita Co., a San Juan Capistrano developer that owns the plane, said Tuesday that they plan to haul the craft to an unspecified site in Los Angeles later this week.

Although the cause of the forced landing is still under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board, McLaurin has told investigators that a fuel leak could be to blame. According to NTSB investigator Gary Mucho in Los Angeles, McLaurin told investigators that the engine failure occurred during a test flight following repair work to a fuel leak aboard the aircraft.

Santa Margarita Co. spokeswoman Diane Gaynor said company officials believe that the cause of the forced landing was loss of fuel.

McLaurin declined to speculate in an interview Tuesday on the cause, pending the NTSB inquiry. He said he is just glad no one was hurt in the plane or on the ground.

22 Years of Flying

“This is my first and I hope my last” emergency landing, said McLaurin, a commercial transport pilot who has been flying for 22 years.

A contract pilot for the Santa Margarita Co., McLaurin said he was on a round-trip test flight between John Wayne Airport and Corona following routine maintenance on, among other things, a fuel leak aboard the aircraft. The aircraft--a corporate version of a commuter airliner model--had undergone its annual inspection last month, he said.

McLaurin, who has ferried Santa Margarita Co. executives and their families in the aircraft since it was purchased by the company a year ago, said he was 10 minutes into his return leg from Corona when the right engine went out.

“I thought we could make it to John Wayne (Airport, where the plane is based), but the second one went out after two to three minutes,” McLaurin said.

Trying in vain to restart the engines, McLaurin prepared for an emergency landing. Although trained for such emergencies, McLaurin said he felt his adrenaline racing because of the danger in trying to make a forced landing in a heavily populated area.

Santa Ana below him was discarded as too congested. The Santa Ana Freeway was still brimming with rush-hour traffic.

That left a pepper field, barely visible as night fell, just north of the Santa Ana Freeway.

With a gliding range of about a mile, McLaurin said he had enough distance left in his aircraft to reach the field. What worried him, however, was the possibility of becoming entangled in power lines on the descent.

“My first concern was a clear area with no jeopardy to anyone on the ground. My second concern was transmission lines, because they are not easy to see,” McLaurin said. “You’re looking for wires all the way in.”

With the plane approaching the field at a steep angle, passengers Pedersen and Johns buckled in and braced for a rough landing. The plane was gliding at 120 m.p.h., but slowed to 80 m.p.h. for the landing.

Keeping the wheels up so he could make a smoother belly landing, McLaurin positioned his plane so it would land across the furrows of pepper plants in order to minimize skidding.

Landing parallel to the furrows, he explained, could have tripled the length of his skid, bringing the plane into the Santa Ana Freeway. Landing across the furrows limited the skid to 500 feet, he said.

“It was a moderately rough landing,” McLaurin said.

Afterwards, McLaurin joked to an Irvine Co. security guard that he would pay for any damaged peppers. The fields had been picked in recent weeks, however.

Relaxing at home Tuesday with his wife, Diane, McLaurin described what was going through his mind after he lost the second engine.

“As long as you’ve got airspeed and some altitude, you’ve got a chance,” he said. “But realistically, you have to consider it (the danger). You just try to cope with it.”