Student, Teacher Die in Brown Field Air Crash : Aviation: Plane was practicing takeoffs and landings when it inexplicably took a nose dive. Both passengers died instantly.

Two persons were killed Saturday morning when their training plane nose-dived into the ground and burned at Brown Field on Otay Mesa, the Federal Aviation Administration reported.

Student trainee Felix Pinzon, 26, a Tijuana resident interested in becoming a commercial pilot, and a 43-year-old veteran instructor, Miguel Duenas 43, manager at Montgomery Field, from San Diego, died instantly, the San Diego County Medical Examiner’s office said Saturday night. The name of the instructor was not available late Saturday night.

The front end of their Cessna 150, a small two-seat, single-engine plane, crumpled into a grassy area just north of the main east-west runway at the border-area airport, San Diego Fire Department officials said.

They had been practicing takeoffs and landings for about 45 minutes before the plane unaccountably crashed at 8:56 a.m., Fire Chief Tony Pollard said.

The FAA’s manager for Brown Field said the accident occurred in calm, clear weather.

“They were in the (landing) pattern getting ready to touch down when they just crashed,” manager Walter Martin said.

Martin said the plane had been landing from the west, touching down briefly on the runway, and then taking off to the east. After winds shifted slightly following a touchdown and takeoff, the pilot was directed to make subsequent landings from the east, Martin said.

“The pilot radioed, ‘roger,’ and the plane was in the air and making a swing around to land (from the east) and it just sort of spiraled down,” Martin said.

The plane belonged to the South Bay Airport Co., based at Brown Field and which rents small planes for flight training. The airport is a popular place for people learning to fly because of its remote location away from more crowded air corridors in the San Diego region.

The manager of the flight school, Juan Escalante, said Saturday that Pinzon had soloed for the first time on Feb. 22. He could not offer any explanation for what happened Saturday.

The airport’s fire-fighting unit sprayed dry chemical retardant onto the plane until San Diego fire-fighting units on Otay Mesa, which include a foam-carrying truck, arrived shortly after the tower called them about 9 a.m., Chief Pollard said.

“The fire was out within a matter of a minute or two after we laid down a blanket of foam, but both victims apparently had been killed instantly,” Pollard said.

There have been numerous crashes in and around Brown Field over the years, most recently the March 16, 1991 crash of a plane carrying seven band members and the tour director for country-Western singer Reba McEntire. The plane slammed into the nearby San Ysidro Mountains during early morning hours after the pilot took off from west to east under visual flight rules without realizing that the steep 3,555-foot mountains loomed directly to the east.

The airport has been touted over the years as a possible alternative to Lindbergh Field as the region’s major airport. But backers of a new regional facility have now shifted their sights to joint use of Tijuana’s international airport. While that airport is less than two miles south of Brown Field and almost straddles the border, its runway configuration is more along a north-south alignment to compensate for the nearby mountains.