Crash Kills Pilot in Lot of Wax Museum

The pilot of a small plane died in a fiery crash early Monday when his aircraft hit fog-shrouded power lines and slammed into an empty parking lot at the Movieland Wax Museum in Buena Park, authorities said.

The pilot was identified as Dale M. Nevitt, 65, who lived in Santa Barbara but commuted weekly to Costa Mesa, where he was general manager of Frost Engineering Services. No one on the ground was injured.

The crash of Nevitt’s four-seat Cessna 172 Skyhawk II occurred about three miles from Fullerton Municipal Airport, where the pilot had been cleared to land after fog diverted him from John Wayne Airport.

The crash occurred about 6:45 a.m., just as museum employees were arriving for work.

“I heard, ‘Boom! Boom!’ and the entire building shook,” said Jeff Johnson, the museum’s lighting manager. “I thought it was an earthquake, because when I ran outside debris was falling from (an electrical) tower.”

“The tower was swaying,” Johnson continued. “And in the end of the parking lot, I saw a big ball of flame. I thought it was a truck on fire, but I couldn’t see well because of the fog. So I got a little closer, about 10 feet, and I said, ‘Wait, this is a plane!’ ”

The burning plane fell in a busy commercial district, about 75 yards short of a tract of homes behind the wax museum. The aircraft landed on its top.

William Pollack, an investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board, said the aircraft was originally scheduled to land at John Wayne, but dense fog limiting visibility to one-sixteenth of a mile forced the pilot to abort.

“He made a low pass over the field (at John Wayne) and decided against it,” Pollack said.

After issuing a “missed-approach procedure,” air traffic controllers at the El Toro Marine Base gave clearance for the plane to land in Fullerton. But the aircraft later disappeared from the radar scope.

“There was no indication (from the pilot) that anything was amiss,” said Elly Brekke, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration.

Fullerton airport director Roland Elder said the pilot could not have been in contact with the airport because the control tower was not open. “Normally, since he was on instrument approach, he should have been about 1,100 feet high,” Elder said. “Something would have had to happen up there before he dropped and hit the power lines.”