Officials Doubt DC-10 Part Tied to Plane Crash

As friends and family prepared to memorialize a Ventura pilot lost at sea, federal investigators continued to look for causes of last week’s crash of a twin-engine plane on its flight from Oxnard to San Diego.

Investigators are even pursuing an intriguing, but unlikely, connection between the crash and a metal engine cover that fell off a DC-10 airliner and was found floating 13 miles from the wreckage of the small plane.

Although investigators have all but dismissed the incidence as a bizarre coincidence, they have sent the DC-10 engine cowling to a laboratory to compare scrapes of paint to that of the small plane.

The Italian-made Spartacus turboprop plane, piloted by 47-year-old John Drust, went down Jan. 9 about 14 miles off the coast from Los Angeles International Airport.

Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board have tentatively identified the DC-10 engine cowling as belonging to a commercial airliner that departed from Los Angeles the morning after Drust’s crash.

“We are still running a number of tests to make absolutely certain,” said Jeff Rich, deputy director of the safety board’s Los Angeles regional office. “We are 99.9% sure that this particular cowling came off the morning of the 10th,” he said, and thus could not have caused the crash by striking the smaller plane.

So far, investigators have been unable to pinpoint what caused the crash that apparently claimed the life of Drust, who was chief pilot of Aspen Helicopters Inc. The Coast Guard has yet to recover a body. And much of the wreckage--which would provide telling clues--has disappeared into waters that are about 3,000 feet deep.

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“It is totally unexplainable,” said Charlie McLaughlin, owner of Aspen Helicopters of Oxnard. “He was a really experienced pilot. He had 9,000 hours of flight time. It had to be a catastrophic problem mechanically or a medical problem.”

Yet Drust was a nonsmoker and a nondrinker who had recently passed a strenuous physical, McLaughlin said. Drust was alone in the 10-seat plane when it went down in the ocean directly off the flight path from the Los Angeles runway.

Crew members aboard Coast Guard vessels and boats from Baywatch and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department found widely scattered wreckage, said Coast Guard Chief Dan Larson.

The flotsam included part of the plane’s fuselage, its seats and some of Drust’s personal effects, including a deck of playing cards and his birth certificate, Larson said.

Most of the items were plucked from the water on Jan. 10 and taken to the docks of the Marina del Rey Harbor Patrol until they could be picked up by federal investigators.

A sheriff’s deputy found the DC-10 engine cowling about 9:30 a.m. Jan. 10 in the water about 13 miles from the small plane’s wreckage, said Sheriff’s Sgt. Ron Spear.

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The distance makes it less likely the heavy metal part had any connection to the crash, but federal investigators said they want to be thorough in their investigation.

As a result, they sent the DC-10 part to a laboratory to compare a streak of blue paint on the cowling to the paint on the small plane. The Spartacus was painted gray with a blue stripe.

The commercial airline carrier that reported losing a DC-10 cowling also uses blue paint for its aircraft trim, Rich said. He declined to identify the airliner until investigators positively link the part to the specific DC-10.

“We should have all of that completed by Monday--whose cowling it is and when it came off,” he said. “We are doing chemical analysis to compare paint smears and running serial numbers on this particular part to track it back to a certain airplane.”

For now, Rich said, “we’re treating it just as a coincidence.”

Meanwhile, family and friends of the lost pilot will hold a memorial service at 10 a.m. today at Sacred Heart Church in Ventura.