Pilot Hurt as Plane Crashes in Park : Aviation: An attorney flying in dense fog misses an airfield and slams into trees and a concession stand in San Dimas. He is listed in critical condition.

The pilot of a twin-engine aircraft trying to land in dense fog at a La Verne airfield early Thursday was critically injured when the plane crashed at a San Dimas park, hitting an empty concession stand and skidding across a parking lot before slamming into a hill, authorities said.

Hugh Gallagher, 57, an attorney from Big Bear Lake, was cut from the mangled wreckage of his eight-seat Cessna by county firefighters and rushed to Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center, where he was in critical condition, authorities said.

“It was like an earthquake,” neighbor Mike Poe said of the impact. “All the windows rattled.”

The crash is the second in two months involving a private plane attempting to land in thick fog at a Southern California airport where the air traffic control tower had not yet opened for the day. In November, a plane en route from Big Bear to Fullerton Airport crashed into a condominium complex, killing the pilot, a passenger and a woman asleep inside the building.

“There are similarities to the Fullerton accident,” said George Petterson, a safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board who is handling both crashes.

Petterson said it is up to the pilot to decide whether to land in foggy conditions. At Brackett Airfield, where Gallagher was attempting to land, the runway must be visible from an attitude of 1,322 feet, he said.

Gallagher’s plane had left Big Bear Airport less than half an hour before it crashed into Frank G. Bonelli Regional County Park at 6:24 a.m., authorities said.

Gallagher was attempting to land on the fog-obscured runway at Bracket Airfield but missed the runway, authorities said. He pulled up and was making another landing attempt when the plane clipped the top of a tree, struck a concession stand, hit two other trees and skidded across the parking lot into a hill, where it flipped over, Sheriff’s Deputy Fidel Gonzales said.

The aircraft landed near houses on Puddingstone Drive and Walnut Avenue, a quarter-mile from the airfield, Petterson said.

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Large chunks of wreckage were scattered over an area the size of a football field. One engine was torn off, striking the concession stand and setting it on fire, while the other ended up in the 500 block of Puddingstone.

“We were yelling, screaming and climbing all over the fuselage to see if the pilot was alive. We couldn’t even see the guy in there,” said Hosea Jefferson, 47, a county parks and recreation worker who was among the first on the scene.

“We heard four or five thumps,” Jefferson said. “We ran outside--it was dark with fog like pea soup. . . . The building was on fire. It didn’t look anyone would survive that crash.”

Gallagher was en route to drop off parts and pick up a passenger, officials said. Because the air traffic control tower at Brackett is closed between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m., Gallagher had contacted the Southern California Terminal Radar Control in San Diego, which oversees regional airspace before local towers open. Ten minutes before the crash, San Diego controllers cleared him for an instruments landing approach at Brackett, NTSB’s Petterson said.

“I’ve been here 8 1/2 years and seen three crashes,” said Mike Noon, a parks supervisor who alerted authorities after seeing the plane crash. “This is the worst crash I’ve seen in the park.”

Transportation officials said they expected to issue a preliminary report on the cause of the crash in five days. A full report could take up to six months.