Jetliner, Small Plane Have Separate Flight Mishaps

In unrelated incidents, a commercial jetliner and a private plane out of John Wayne Airport had flight problems Friday afternoon, officials said.

Shortly after Delta Air Lines Flight 328 took off from John Wayne for Salt Lake City at 5:23 p.m., a warning light indicated a problem with an oil filter in an engine of the nearly empty Boeing 757, said Jackie Pate, a spokeswoman for Delta in Atlanta.

The pilot shut off the engine and diverted to Los Angeles International Airport. The plane landed there safely about 20 minutes later, Federal Aviation Administration duty officer Art Morriston said in Hawthorne. The plane remained at LAX overnight for repairs.

Flight 328, which can hold 187 passengers on its normally scheduled flight between Orange County and Salt Lake City, carried just seven passengers, the flight crew and attendants.

In the other incident, student pilot Chet Bennett had just finished a one-hour training flight in a two-passenger plane when he veered from the airport’s landing strip, resulting in slight damage to the nose of the single-engine CAP-10, airport spokeswoman Courtney Wiercioch said.

Bennett, accompanied by instructor Keith Frey, were traveling about 10 m.p.h. at 3:30 p.m. when Bennett had trouble steering the plane and stopped in a grassy area at the edge of the short landing strip, said Mike Church, manager of Sunrise Aviation Inc., which operates the plane at John Wayne.

No one was hurt, airport officials said.