Pilot Is Killed After Bailing Out of Plane : Aviation: The homemade, experimental aircraft had experienced problems in an earlier test flight.

An Encinitas man described as a highly qualified pilot by fellow fliers was killed Friday when he bailed out of his homemade airplane after the engine began sputtering during a test flight above Brown Field.

James A. Speyer, 41, was approaching the Otay Mesa landing strip at 10:25 a.m. at an altitude of 150 feet when the plane’s engine apparently failed and the left wing fell off, said Bill Leard, an investigator with the San Diego County medical examiner’s office.

Speyer bailed out, but his parachute did not have time to open because he was too near the ground, Leard said. He died on impact in a grassy field about a quarter of a mile from the landing strip at the east end of Brown Field.

Speyer, who owned Western Wholesale Appliances in Escondido, had had trouble with the plane’s engine stopping and with raising the wings during a test flight in October, according to the Experimental Aircraft Assn.

Federal Aviation Administration inspectors at the scene Friday said they were unable to determine the exact cause of the accident. The National Transportation and Safety Board will continue the investigation.

Brown Field air traffic controllers received two Mayday calls just before Speyer’s plane, a single-engine, two-seater Avid Amphibian, went down, said Operations Manager Mike Tussey.

“Then something happened real quickly,” said Tussey, who was the first to arrive at the scene.

Ben Hunsacker, director emeritus of the Experimental Aircraft Assn., said Speyer had built the parts of the plane at home and brought them to the EAA hangar at Brown Field in September to assemble the 800-pound craft, which had a cruising speed of 70 knots.

During the Oct. 25 test flight, Speyer had to manually stabilize the plane after turns, which Hunsacker called a “very, very minor thing.” Normally, an airplane will right itself automatically, he said.

That flight ended when the engine quit at about 3,500 feet, and Speyer had to make a “dead stick” landing, in which the propeller is not turning.

“He glided into a perfect landing,” Hunsacker said. After the flight, Speyer fixed the controls, he added.

Speyer was commended in the association’s November newsletter for his “observance of safety measures in his flight testing.”

“He was a perfectionist,” Hunsacker said of Speyer, who was known for spending almost every day in October working on his aircraft.

The newsletter described Speyer’s “immaculate workmanship” in his cockpit instrumentation, noting that “such installation in this category of home-built aircraft boggles the mind.”

FAA Inspector Swede Gamble said experimental aircraft, which take an average of five years to build, are usually safe.

“A lot of expertise goes into them,” he said. The builders “generally do a very meticulous job, even more meticulous than on some of the civilian aircraft.”

The FAA inspects and monitors the planes at different stages of construction and requires about 40 hours of test flying before a plane can be flown outside the perimeters of the airport, Gamble said. He did not know when Speyer’s plane had last been checked.

Speyer is survived by a son in Pennsylvania and his father and a brother in Tennessee, medical investigator Leard said.