Navy Probes Crash Site as Families Mourn

Even as Navy search teams scoured ocean waters Friday for signs of survivors and debris from the midair collision of two of its planes, officials released the names of 19 of the 27 crew members presumed killed in the worst naval accident in decades.

The remaining eight names are expected to be released today, once relatives are notified.

Word of the deaths shattered families around the country, including that of Richard Anthony Tafoya, 21, of Glendale, a 1987 graduate of Glendale’s Hoover High School.

Tafoya enlisted in the Navy during his senior year to pursue his dream of becoming a “Top Gun” pilot, the Navy’s best fliers.

Standing in the driveway of the apartment building where Richard grew up, Tom Tafoya, 25, said his little brother, the youngest of the three Tafoya children, was well on his way to fulfilling his lifelong goal.

“He was accepted into the Navy’s Officer Training School,” Tafoya said. “He was so close to becoming a pilot, so close. . . .”

His death seemed impossible, said his sister, Valerie Tafoya, 23. After all, just last weekend Richard had driven down from Moffett Naval Air Field near San Francisco to visit his family.

“He was very family-oriented,” she said. “All his nieces and nephews loved him because he would play with them, and he always seemed happy.”

But there was little room to hope. The word that he was missing and presumed dead had come from Navy officials at the Long Beach station more than 24 hours ago. Tafoya was the only Californian listed among the presumed dead.

In San Diego, meanwhile, Navy officials reported that they had found two lines of debris, including exposure suits and helmets, about 100 yards apart in the ocean.

And at Moffett, in Mountain View, a grim-faced group of Navy officials--buoyed until Thursday morning by the military victory in the Persian Gulf--announced the beginning of two separate investigations to determine what caused the crash that apparently took the lives of Tafoya and 26 other young Navy men.

The two all-weather P-3 Orion turboprop planes collided in a fiery flash in stormy weather at 2:26 a.m. Thursday, 60 miles southwest of San Diego. One plane apparently was arriving to relieve the other, which had been airborne for 7 1/2 hours.

Rear Adm. Tony Maness, commander of the Pacific Fleet’s Patrol Wings at Moffett--the planes’ point of origin--said the Navy had ruled out mechanical failure, although he would not elaborate. “We have no reason to expect mechanical complications,” he said.

The plane that was about to be relieved had reported a minor problem with an auxiliary communication device, but Navy officials and an industry expert insisted the problem would not have contributed to the crash. The flawed equipment was a datalink device, one of two means the planes’ navigator-communicators have of talking with one another.

“It’s no more significant than if you are driving down the freeway and the car radio quit working--it’s not going to cause you to crash into another car,” said Jim Ragsdale, spokesman for Lockheed, which manufactures the plane.

Navy officials believe key communications were working and that the two pilots were in contact minutes before their crafts collided.

When flying P-3s over water in operations like the one this week, the pilots, aided by a sonar buoy, approach each other at altitudes at least 1,000 feet apart. They are not guided by a control tower, and must negotiate their own maneuvers and inform each other of their altitude, an activity called “free-lancing.”

Both pilots had to complete a rigorous two-year training program to qualify for certification, which included a minimum of 800 flying hours. This was their first tour flying the P-3s. The rest of the crew’s experience ranged from two years to more than 30 years, Maness said.

“Something went wrong,” Maness said. “The purpose of this investigation is to find out what went wrong.”

A tape of the radio communication may be among the wreckage, but it probably will not be of much help, officials said. Unlike a protected black box in a conventional aircraft, the recorder in the P-3 is not waterproof, fireproof or designed to resist a crash. Not housed in a durable shell, it is used to reconstruct the mission, usually for training purposes.

In the two parallel investigations--one conducted by the judge advocate general’s office and the other a standard mishap inquiry--Navy officials will look into a number of variables, including weather, equipment, communications, the nature of the mission, and the experience of the air crew.

“We will study it all very carefully,” said Senior Chief Petty Officer Bob Howard, a Navy spokesman.

But in Glendale on Friday, the talk among friends and neighbors who had gathered to console Richard Tafoya’s family was not of mechanical failure or lack of it, or even whether stormy weather was the culprit.

It was of a young man’s passion for playing his guitar and for running--both of which his family said he excelled in.

They recalled that he had received a varsity letter in football his senior year at Hoover, earned good grades and was well-known both at school and in his neighborhood.

“He was an unselfish person, one who would do anything to help others,” his brother said. “He had many, many friends in Glendale and in the Navy.”

Times staff writer Rod Wade in Glendale contributed to this report.