Airport Workers Watch Grisly Crash in Horror

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 escaped the path of the tumbling plane as it lost power in its right engine and veered into the desert grass beyond an asphalt runway.

It was a grisly scene. The nose-first crash sheared 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, 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 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.

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 one diver with more than 4,000 jumps. Another was on his first.

“They are people who have an overwhelming love of life,” Wallace said, trying to make sense of the tragedy. “They are trying to live life to the fullest.”

Wallace and other sky divers spent the afternoon 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.”

Another sky diver, Kelly Musante, 27, of Anaheim who nearly went to the Perris air field Wednesday morning, was devastated by the number of friends whose names were appearing on unofficial lists of the dead.

“These were all good people, good to everybody,” she said mournfully. “This was what they lived for--sky diving.”

Musante, a regular at the Perris field with more than 400 jumps, shivered at the thought that she might have been on that plane.

“I’ve made hundreds of jumps from that airplane,” she said. “It’s really starting to sink in that this can happen to any of us. . . . This sport is a risk. But I’ll tell you, taking off in a plane scares me more than jumping out of one.”

Musante said the Twin Otter was one of two workhorse planes used by the sky diving schools, and both were well maintained.

LeRoy Guilford, 39, heard about the crash while shopping at a computer store. His brother, Rowland, was the pilot. Guilford headed home, where he got a phone call from another brother confirming it was indeed their brother’s plane. Rowland Guilford, 45, of Riverside, has five children, his brother said.

“I spoke to him this morning and ironically he never mentioned flying this morning,” a bewildered LeRoy Guilford said.

As the day came to an end, and the crowd around the pool thinned, veteran sky divers said this was by far the worst day in the long history of the popular no-frills Airsports Capital of the World. But, they said, the airport and sport of sky-diving would recover.

“(Sky-diving) is a privilege,” said 15-year jumper Mark Sechler. “We build our lives around it.”

Times staff writer Kristina Lindgren contributed to this report.