5 on Corporate Jet Killed in Santa Ana Crash

Five people were killed Wednesday when a corporate jet slammed nose-first into a field next to a jammed auto mall and burst into flames.

Minutes before the crash, the pilot of the twin-engine Westwind 24 contacted the control tower at John Wayne Airport and was cleared for landing, officials said. Air traffic controllers said they received no word that the aircraft was in trouble.

“Everything was absolutely routine at the point of the last communication with the aircraft,” said Fred O’Donnell, a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman. “There was no indication by the pilot of any problem.”

Witnesses reported seeing the plane, its engines eerily silent, glide above the string of auto dealerships that make up the Santa Ana Auto Mall. The plane then spiraled straight down and exploded on impact. Large sections of the aircraft and the remains of the passengers were scattered 30 yards away.

The pilot was identified as John O. McDaniel, 49, of Long Beach. The names of the other victims could not be immediately determined.

“It was just a mess. You could feel the heat of the explosion right through the windows of our dealership,” said Jim Hogan, sales manager of the Crevier BMW dealership about 150 feet from the crash.

Steve Webb, a California Highway Patrol motorcycle officer, was riding north on the Costa Mesa Freeway just south of Edinger Avenue when he caught a glimpse of the falling plane. The aircraft’s lights were on, he said, but there was no sound.

“It was like you threw something up and it came straight down,” Webb said. “I thought it had hit another plane because of the incline.”

The plane is registered to Management Activities Inc. of Long Beach and the registered agent is Dr. Robert Gumbiner, founder and chairman of FHP International Corp. of Fountain Valley, one of the country’s largest health maintenance organizations. A woman at Gumbiner’s home, who would not identify herself, said he was not on the plane. She added that he frequently leases it to others.

The plane had taken off from Brackett Airfield in La Verne, about a 25-mile flight to Orange County. An airport service worker at Brackett said the plane stopped there briefly, just after 5 p.m.

National Transportation Safety Board officials were at the scene Wednesday night in an effort to determine the cause of the crash.

Some witnesses said the plane appeared to run out of fuel and speculated that the pilot was looking for a remote area in which to land.

Coast Terminal Radar Control in El Toro had monitored the flight and “handed off” the plane to John Wayne Airport’s air traffic controllers when the aircraft was six miles from landing. The transition to John Wayne was made smoothly, and then the crash occurred, FAA officials said.

The aircraft had descended to about 3,000 feet when it made contact with the John Wayne Airport control tower.