A Pleasure Flight That Turned Tragic : Crash: Six died when a small plane nosedived in Lancaster, including a couple who were to marry today. Why the craft ran out of fuel remains unknown.

If life were fair, Israel Feldman and Orit Mor would have stood side-by-side today under a chupah, vowing in a traditional Jewish wedding ceremony to love each other till death took them apart.

Instead, the couple died two weeks ago today along with four friends--three of them siblings--aboard a small plane that Feldman was piloting when it slammed nose first into the ground in Lancaster with such force that there was little of it or its passengers left to salvage. The plane’s engines were driven three feet into the asphalt by the impact.

What started as a simple overnight pleasure trip to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon resulted in a violent end to six young lives. Killed in the crash were Feldman, 34, and his fiance, Mor, 31, both of Sherman Oaks; brother and sister Oren, 27, and Tali Amrani, 16, of Agoura Hills; their brother, Alon Amrani, 21, of Thousand Oaks, and Oren’s girlfriend, Daphna Zachar, 27.

All except Mor were born in Israel, where the remains of all six were returned last week for burial.

Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board said the rented twin-engine Cessna 310 ran out of fuel, and Feldman, for reasons unknown, simply lost control of the aircraft, apparently as he made a fuel stop in Lancaster while en route home to Van Nuys Airport.

Despite official explanations, questions linger for friends and family of the victims.

What caused the plane to crash with such an experienced pilot at the controls? Why did Feldman fly past several airstrips if the plane was low on fuel? Why was there no indication of distress when landing instructions were requested just a minute before the plane crashed?

And the biggest questions: Where did the plane go after leaving the Grand Canyon instead of returning directly to Van Nuys--a two-hour detour that apparently used up its fuel reserve? And why?

If one domino in the chain of events leading to the crash had been different, maybe the flight that wiped out half a family instead could have been a routine journey.

“He was about two minutes from the airport” when the fuel ran out, said Don Llorente, supervisory air safety investigator with the NTSB. “One (additional) gallon on each side . . . (and) he would have been able to make the landing.”

At the funeral Tuesday for her three children in the Israeli port of Haifa, according to one spectator, Madlen Amrani cried out in her native Hebrew: “There is no God. If there is a God, why are they dead?”

Yehiam Konski, owner of the destroyed, Van Nuys-based Cessna 310 and an Israeli-born pilot with a commercial license and instrument and helicopter ratings, believes there is no mystery. He believes his plane simply ran out of fuel and Feldman was somehow distracted in his efforts to glide to a landing.

However, Feldman’s longtime friend, Cnaan Lifshitz, said Feldman was a pillar of calm in times of distress, recalling that Feldman, who served with him in an Israeli army artillery unit, remained level-headed during fighting in Lebanon in 1979.

It was flying that brought Feldman to the United States five years ago, his friends say.

“He just came to do his pilot certification, to become a pilot,” Lifshitz said. Feldman achieved that goal in a fairly short time, but Lifshitz persuaded him to stay on. Feldman moved in with Lifshitz and Lifshitz’s girlfriend, now his wife, in their small apartment. The three later lived together for two years in a Van Nuys house Lifshitz and Feldman bought together.

They were like a family, Lifshitz said, recalling that they would playfully argue over who should wash the dinner dishes and then stay up half the night in philosophical debate.

Lifshitz’s wife, Varda, frequently tried to play the role of matchmaker for Feldman, with no luck.

Then early this year, Feldman met Mor in an Israeli folk dance group. Mor, born in Lebanon and raised in Israel, was visiting her twin sister, Ramona, who lives with her husband and child in Encino.

Friends say it was love at first sight for the reserved Feldman and the quiet Mor. “They were in love very much,” said Mor’s brother, Jack Yehouda, from Tel Aviv. “She said, ‘This is the person I would like to spend the rest of my life with.’ ”

She became a fixture on the seat beside Feldman whenever he took a plane up. Yehouda said his sister always spoke of how beautiful the world looked from the air and never expressed concern about flying in small planes.

It was through his Sherman Oaks business, I.F. Forklift, that Feldman met the Amranis, who came from Israel in 1988.

At the time of the crash, Oren Amrani, the eldest son, was working at Packard Bell Electronics in Chatsworth and attending school, hoping to become an attorney. Alon Amrani ran the family business, Universal Recycling Center in Canoga Park, while he studied to become an accountant. Young Tali Amrani had just received her driver’s license and a new car from her dad.

The relationship was both professional and personal. Feldman repaired equipment at the Amranis’ recycling center and often flew Amrani family members to various destinations.

Lifshitz said that when Feldman and Mor stopped at his house the night before the Las Vegas trip, they never mentioned the coming flight. Perhaps they were too excited about why they had come--to personally deliver an invitation to their wedding.

Feldman, who did not own a plane, frequently rented aircraft from Konski, a member of the Van Nuys Airport-based Israeli Flying Club that Feldman helped found. In four years, Feldman had amassed about 480 hours as a pilot, including about 45 in twin-engine planes. His Federal Aviation Administration record was clear of accidents or infractions of flying regulations.

But a battered logbook found in the wreckage showed Feldman had only three hours of experience piloting that Cessna 310, all of it within days of the fatal trip.

On the trip to Las Vegas, the six-seat plane carried Feldman, Mor, Alon, Tali and Arie Amrani and the father’s friend, Uri Raz.

They were going to join Oren and his girlfriend, Daphna Zachar, who flew to Las Vegas the day before by commercial airliner to attend a Julio Iglesias concert.

The Cessna left Van Nuys at 4:55 p.m. and arrived in Las Vegas, apparently without incident, at 6:20 p.m.

The Israelis spent the night at the Imperial Palace. They gambled some, met up with some other Israelis and enjoyed each other’s company, particularly in the last meal they shared.

A week after the crash, Raz vividly remembered their Sunday morning breakfast, describing with clarity the laughter that permeated the meal.

“It was a very happy breakfast,” said Raz--”loud, a lot of jokes, a good time.”

After breakfast, Daphna Zachar, who came to the United States three years ago and worked as a nanny in Westlake, and her boyfriend, Oren Amrani, gave their Delta tickets to Raz and Oren’s father, Arie, in exchange for seats on the Cessna. Oren and Daphna, who were expected to marry in the next year, went with Feldman, Mor and Alon and Tali Amrani for the flight to the Grand Canyon.

The Cessna left Las Vegas at 11:49 a.m. and landed at the Grand Canyon Airport at 12:45 p.m., a typical time for the distance covered. Arie Amrani and Raz left Las Vegas on the commercial airliner at 4:10 p.m., eight minutes after Amrani’s children and the others left at 4:02 p.m. from the Grand Canyon.

Konski said that when the Cessna left Van Nuys at the start of the journey, its two main and two auxiliary fuel tanks were full, with 130 gallons. The NTSB investigation showed that in Las Vegas Feldman purchased 20 gallons of fuel and in the Grand Canyon another 25.4 was added--which, due to a fuel pumper’s mistake, was five gallons more than Feldman had ordered.

No flight plan for the Cessna 310 was required and none was filed. But aviation experts say that the refueling at the Grand Canyon gave the plane more than enough fuel for the two-hour direct flight back to Van Nuys. But the plane did not fly directly back, and no one knows where it went in the four hours between its final takeoff and the Lancaster crash.

The two-hour detour was enough to have taken the plane more than 400 miles at its usual cruising speed of about 220 m.p.h.

FAA regulations require a pilot to keep a fuel reserve good for 30 minutes beyond the planned destination. But the instrument panel was destroyed in the crash, so it is unknown if the fuel gauge was working.

Just a minute before crashing, someone on the ill-fated plane radioed the Fox Field control tower for landing instructions. The speaker made no mention of any problem with the plane, although it must have had little or no fuel left at the time.

Radar data reviewed after the accident show that when the pilot lost control, the plane was about 2,600 feet above Lancaster. In the last two radar readings, moments before the crash, it dropped 700 feet in less than 4.5 seconds, indicating it was descending at more than 100 m.p.h.

Witnesses said at first they noticed the plane appeared to lose altitude, then began rapidly spiraling toward the desert floor, crashing in a near vertical dive on a lightly traveled portion of Avenue H-6 between Sierra Highway and Division Street. Pilots say that what witnesses saw was a “stall-spin,” indicating the engine had quit.

Arie Amrani saw a television report Sunday night about the Lancaster crash, but considered only for an instant that it could be the aircraft carrying his family. Several nervous hours later, when the children failed to arrive home, he called the plane’s owner and learned the news.

A few days later, a devastated Amrani flew to Israel to join his wife and surviving 10-year-old son to prepare for the burial of his three children.

He had brought his family to the United States in 1988, according to friends, as debts piled up on his business in Haifa. Now, despite a growing recycling business in Canoga Park, he is considering moving back to Haifa with his wife and their remaining son, Tomer, friends say.

About 25 friends and fellow pilots erected a monument at the crash site last Sunday from stones and stray pieces of the Cessna 310 that investigators failed to recover. On one of the larger metal scraps they inscribed in Hebrew the names of the six whose lives were lost.

The undelivered wedding invitations and Mor’s wedding dress remain in a box at her sister’s Encino home, where the ceremony was to be held today.

Although Mor and Feldman never sanctified their union, their families buried them next to each other in Tel Aviv, a symbol of their love.

“We look at them as married,” said Feldman’s brother Ephrain, also a pilot. Although Ephrain plans to come to Southern California to try to sort out what caused his brother’s death, for now he reluctantly concludes: “This was his fate.”