Pilot, 62, Survives Crash Into Mountain

A Pasadena man flying a homemade plane smashed into a mountainside 100 yards from the Golden State Freeway near Castaic, then crawled to the side of an isolated road where he lay for 12 hours overnight before being discovered Friday by the California Highway Patrol.

Two CHP officers en route to a traffic accident on the freeway said they found Donald Compton by chance as they were turning around at 3:45 a.m. on an access road used by state highway workers.

When they pulled up, the officers said, Compton was lying beside the road and lifted a bloody arm. CHP Officer Richard Getzelman said he could see that Compton had cuts all over his forehead, cheeks and lips.

“We thought we had an assault victim . . . that someone had dumped him,” Getzelman said. “We weren’t sure what we had here.”

Getzelman said he and his partner, Officer Frank Schulz, gave Compton first aid and a blanket.

But when they asked him what happened, they were puzzled. Compton spoke of a crash, but no vehicle was nearby.

Then Compton spoke of a plane crash, but they couldn’t see a plane.

“He couldn’t walk. He couldn’t move his legs. We asked him how he got where he was,” Getzelman said.

He was surprised by Compton’s answer. “He crawled,” Getzelman said. “He had no idea where he was. He said he was crawling for a long time.”

Compton, who is 62, had apparently crawled about 100 yards in rugged terrain after his single-seat, home-built plane crashed in heavy fog at 4:44 p.m. Thursday.

CHP Officer Wendy Moore said witnesses reported a plane crash near the side of the freeway at the time of the accident, and authorities sent a helicopter and several patrol units to search.

But when they were unable to find anything in the deserted, foggy area, they assumed the call was a hoax and called off the search after about an hour, Moore said.

“We get calls like that often,” Moore said of the false reports. “You’d be surprised.”

The plane, with a red, white and blue tail and the inscriptions “Navy” and “Bad Boy,” was found near the Templin Highway exit, about 20 miles north of Castaic in an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County.

Its nose was tucked at a 45-degree angle beneath the cockpit, its wings snapped off and lying beside the craft, Moore said.

Compton did not file a flight plan, and did not receive a flight briefing, which would have supplied weather information, according to Carol Long, a spokeswoman for the Western Pacific Region of the Federal Aviation Administration.

“Thankfully it was not a fatal accident,” Long said. “The pilot is injured, but alive.”

The cause of the accident is under investigation.

Compton was taken to Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital, where he was alert but in intensive care, hospital sources said. Hospital officials declined to release any information on Compton’s condition.

Getzelman could only marvel that he had turned his head in the passenger seat at just the moment the squad car was passing Compton.

“It was cold and windy,” Getzelman said. “He probably would not have survived if we didn’t find him. I don’t believe morning watch would have used that road until 7:30 a.m. By that time, it would have been too late.”