Santa Clarita / Antelope Valley : 3 Men Killed in Crash of C-130 Firefighting Plane Identified

Authorities have identified the three crew members who died when a firefighting plane crashed Saturday in rugged terrain near Palmdale, but the cause of the accident remained under investigation Thursday.

Three men were aboard a privately owned C-130 plane, under contract to the U.S. Forest Service, that took off from a Hemet airfield to drop fire retardant liquid on a forest fire in Kern County.

Witnesses said they saw a mid-air explosion, causing a wing to detach from the body of the plane just before it crashed in Angeles National Forest near Devil’s Punchbowl, a county park.

The plane was owned by Hemet Valley Flying Service. Its president, Jim Venable, confirmed the identities of the crew members Thursday.

“This is a tragic accident,” Venable said. He said the C-130’s captain was Robert Lawrence Buc, 61, a retired Navy aviator who lived in Missoula, Mont.

The co-pilot was Joe William Johnson, 60, a retired Eastern Airlines pilot who also had been a Navy aviator. Johnson was from Boca Raton, Fla. Also killed was flight engineer Shawn Douglas Zaremba, 30, of Hemet.

Investigators from the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board were trying to determine why the plane crashed.

“Witnesses said the aircraft appeared to have exploded in flight,” said FAA spokesman Hank Verbais. “But it’s way too early for either the FAA or the safety board to say with any kind of certainty what caused the crash.”

Venable said an initial inspection suggested that one of the C-130’s four engines caught fire and blew up, causing the wing to detach.

Don Cockrum, a California Department of Forestry battalion chief at Hemet, said the mood among firefighting pilots at the airfield has been somber since Saturday’s crash.

He said that Hemet is the world’s busiest airport for firefighting planes, and many of the pilots based there were acquainted with the crew members who died.