Airport Workers Watch Grisly Crash in Horror

PERRIS — Flight instructor Neil Whelchel was tending to a fleet of ultra-light planes near the dusty airstrip here when he heard a strange noise come from a twin-engine plane taking off just a football field away.

Whelchel had watched the De Havilland DHC-6 Twin Otter soar into the sky dozens of times, packed tight with excited sky divers in goggles and jumpsuits. But within seconds he knew this flight would be the plane’s last.

“It was coming straight for me,” an exhausted Whelchel recalled Wednesday. “I never ran that fast in my life.”

Whelchel, sweating profusely, his T-shirt and jeans smeared with dirt, escaped the path of the tumbling plane as it appeared to lose power in its right engine and veered into the desert grass beyond an asphalt runway.

It was a grisly scene. The nose-first crash sheered off the front of the plane and both of its wings. When Whelchel arrived at the wreckage, he found the twisted body of a man--he believed one of the pilots--on the ground.

“I’ve never seen anything so gruesome. Heads were cut off,” said Perris Valley Airport worker Julio Henao, an instructor in ultra-light planes, essentially motorized gliders, who also rushed to the crash site. “The pilots were in pieces. The survivors were toward the back of the plane. Everybody was wearing their chutes.”

Some rescuers still had blood on their hands as they related grim stories of sorting through the carnage, even stumbling upon friends they had made over lunch at the airport’s Spartan bar and grill.

Wayne Kunze, president of Ultralight Squadron of America, said he climbed into the back of the plane, where most of the survivors were seated, and guided those who could move out a rear door.

“All we could do was pull them out, take a look at them, see what condition they were in,” Kunze said. “We tried to keep their heads and backs straight.”

Across the field, at the other end of the runway, Jim Wallace was doing paperwork at his desk in the tin-roofed headquarters of the Perris Valley Sky Diving School. Wallace, the school’s chief instructor, heard the same feathering of an engine, followed by a loud bang.

An athletic-looking man in aviator-frame glasses, Wallace fought back tears as he learned the dead included students, instructors and video camera operators from his school. The flight roster that day listed at least one diver with more than 4,000 jumps. Another was on his first jump.

Wallace and other sky divers spent the afternoon around the school’s kidney-shaped swimming pool, waiting anxiously for word about the dead and injured. Some quietly embraced one another. Others drowned their sorrows in a pitcher of beer.

Between answering questions and taking phone calls, Wallace consoled one puffy-eyed woman who apparently had missed the flight because she arrived at the airport late. “It was the luck of the draw, a flip of the coin,” he told her. “If you ever had to be late, today was the day.”

Rollie Tackett of Hemet has flown out of the field for 10 years. When he got word of the crash, he rushed from home to offer assistance. Noting how close-knit the fraternity of pilots and sky divers is, Tackett said, “This is a terrible tragedy for this community.”

Following is a partial list of names of those confirmed dead or injured in the Perris crash by the Riverside County Coroner’s office and hospital officials.

Deceased:

Geoffrey Anderson, 26, student parachutist of Moreno Valley

Scott Border, flight instructor of Moreno Valley

Anthony Cabrera, 25, of Covina

Jacqueline Downs, 27, parachutist videotaping the flight, of Perris

Larry Fatino, flight instructor of Aguanga

Rowland Guilford, 44, pilot of Riverside

Christopher Harrell, 28, of Perry, Oklahoma

James Ian Layne, 21, parachutist of Menifee

John Mitchell, 43, flight instructor of Perris

Christophe Ribet, 25, of San Diego

Dwight Sanders, 27, of Huber Heights, Ohio

Injured:

Troy Widgery, 25, of Menifee Valley, serious condition with hip injuries and bruises at Loma Linda University Medical Center

Dan Brodsky-Chenfeld, 30, of Sun City, critical but stable condition with head injuries at Loma Linda University Medical Center.

Three other unnamed victims were reported in critical condition at Riverside General Hospital with head, chest or spinal injuries.