2 Hurt as Light Plane Crashes on Freeway

A World War II-vintage airplane crashed onto California 163 Monday, injuring the plane’s two occupants and forcing authorities to close northbound lanes of the freeway for about an hour.

The plane, a single-engine, four-seat Navion once used for training military pilots, crashed shortly after taking off from Montgomery Field about 1 p.m., said Miguel Duenas, an operations assistant at the city-owned airfield.

The pilot, Lawrence David Smith, 51, and his passenger, Wayne Gibson, 60, both of San Diego, were taken to Sharp Memorial Hospital. Both were listed in serious but stable condition with back injuries, said Gwen Barnett, a spokeswoman for the hospital.

Witnesses said the plane began to surge and appeared to lose power soon after it became airborne, said Joe Garrison, a field operations officer for the California Highway Patrol.

“The tower saw them take a dive,” Garrison said.

The plane touched down less than a mile from the airport, skidding across the four northbound lanes of California 163 south of the Balboa Avenue exit before striking the concrete center divider.

When the crash occurred, the plane was probably going about 35 m.p.h., Garrison said.

Firefighters reached the scene “within two minutes,” said Capt. Al Macdonald of the San Diego Fire Department.

The plane did not hit any cars on the freeway, and there was no fire.

“If there was a fire, we would have had two deceased people on our hands,” Macdonald said. “No cars were hit, which is a miracle in itself.”

Because Smith and Gibson were trapped, rescuers were forced to remove the plane’s canopy to pull them from the cockpit, Macdonald said.

CHP officers moved quickly to divert traffic off the northbound lanes of the freeway at its interchange with Interstate 805. Firefighters doused the crash area with a fire-retardant chemical as a precaution.

In all, about 40 firefighters and 15 CHP officers responded to the accident, along with an unknown number of San Diego police officers.

About 2 p.m., workers loaded the plane onto a flatbed truck and hauled it back to Montgomery Field for inspection by federal aircraft crash investigators. Minutes later, CHP officers reopened the road.

Jeff Reynolds, a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman, said the cause of the accident was not known. The plane’s destination also was unknown.

Duenas said the plane was regularly stored at Montgomery Field, and Smith was a co-owner of the aircraft.

Aside from the damage to its nose cone, the plane appeared to have been in very good condition externally, Macdonald said.

Navion planes were used to train military pilots during World War II, and production of Navion models continued into the late 1940s, Macdonald said, adding, “They’re like Cadillacs, they’re built real strong.”

After emergency personnel and reporters gathered near the scene, an altercation apparently broke out between a police officer and a television news cameraman.

While Channel 8 reporter Gina Lew was reporting on the crash live from nearby Kearny Villa Road, an officer climbed on top of the station’s van, covered the TV camera’s lens with his hand, and pushed it away from the scene, Lew said.

Lew said the officer told the camera crew that its van was obstructing traffic on the road.

“We were kind of surprised,” Lew said. “We think (the officer) overreacted.”

Plane Crash: Plane crashes in the northbound lanes of California 163