Air Controller Didn’t Verify Plane’s Landing

The wreckage of a small cargo plane that crashed on a foggy night at Van Nuys Airport, killing the pilot, went undiscovered for four hours after an air traffic controller who was guiding the pilot failed to check on how the landing went, a federal accident investigator said Tuesday.

FAA rules require that “flight plans be closed or canceled or terminated in some manner, otherwise search-and-rescue procedures commence,” said Investigator Wayne Pollock of the National Transportation Safety Board.

Although it is premature to draw conclusions on last Thursday’s incident, “There should have been a further conversation” between the pilot and traffic controller after the plane landed, he said. “But there was none and that’s under investigation.”

The FAA could not be reached for comment, but a veteran air traffic controller, who asked not to be identified, said that contacting a pilot after a landing “is not a requirement, just good technique.”

Investigators are trying to determine why the plane was so far off course upon landing that it missed the runway entirely and why it took so long for the crash to be discovered.

The Van Nuys Airport control tower was closed at the time of the crash. But a transcript and tape recording of radio conversations just prior to the fatal crash revealed that a controller at an FAA air traffic center in San Diego was monitoring by radar and radio contact the pilot’s descent just 2 minutes and 10 seconds before the plane crashed.

The twin-engine Cessna nosed into a taxiway 525 feet east of the runway the pilot was aiming for at 1:19 a.m., then slid more than 700 feet into a cluster of parked aircraft, killing the pilot, Robert A. Olson, 32, of Medford, Ore.

The wreckage and body were not discovered until after the fog lifted enough for airport police to patrol the airfield, more than four hours later. The Los Angeles County coroner’s office has said, however, that Olson died on impact or within minutes, appearing to rule out the possibility that he might have been saved if the wreckage had been seen immediately.

Olson was flying a load of bank checks and other documents from Las Vegas to Burbank early Thursday morning, but his plane was diverted to Van Nuys Airport due to fog at Burbank, which ironically was just then lifting at Burbank and rolling into Van Nuys, pilots and air controllers said.

While Burbank has an air traffic control tower staffed by the FAA 24 hours a day, the Van Nuys Airport tower has no one on duty between 10:45 p.m. and 5:45 a.m.

Some critics of the Van Nuys operation suggest that if FAA controllers had been operating at Van Nuys, they might have been able to alert pilots to the unexpected thick fog or take other steps to prevent the accident, the first fatal incident in more than 10 years.

A transcript reviewed by investigators Tuesday indicate that the last FAA air traffic controller at the Southern California TRACON--Terminal Radar Control--center that handled the plane was talking with Olson at least 20 minutes prior to the crash, according to Pollack.

At 1:13:20, the controller directed Olson to tune in to the Van Nuys Airport radio frequency and to turn off his crash locater signal--a standard step to avoid sending misleading “crashed aircraft” signals on airport grounds. The controller added: “I’ll be monitoring,” Pollack said.

At 1:16:47, Olson announced he had “the airport in sight.”

The air controller acknowledged, referring to the plane by its number: “Four-Six Mike, thanks.”

“There is no further contact with the airplane by the controller,” Pollack said.

The FAA air traffic controller who asked not to be identified said the conversation between the pilot and the controller was fairly typical of procedures in handling aircraft landing at an airport without an on-site control tower staff. However, he said he would have asked the pilot to notify him that he had cleared the runway.

“It’s not an [FAA] requirement, it’s just a good technique that some controllers use at uncontrolled fields,” said the expert, a veteran familiar with Southern California airports.