3 Die When Small Jet Slams Into Building

A small plane tumbled from the sky Saturday afternoon, crashed through the roof of a biomedical warehouse and burst into flames, killing all three people aboard and sending more than 80 weekend employees of an adjacent biomedical manufacturing complex fleeing the fire.

“There wasn’t any opportunity for anyone to survive that fire, which was fueled by jet fuel,” Orange County Fire Division Chief Rich Witesman said. The blaze was under control in less than an hour, he said.

The pilot and owner of the plane was identified by coroner’s investigators as Air Force Sgt. David Brooks Covell, 48, stationed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County.

The passengers, both from Orange County, were David R. Hughes, 57, of Cypress, and Tina Schroder, 37, of Newport Beach. Schroder was a member of the Amelia Earhart 99 Club, a group of women aviators, officials said.

The four-seat, twin-engine Paris Jet MS-760 took off from John Wayne Airport about 1 p.m., airport spokeswoman Pat Ware said. Just moments into the flight, the pilot sent a distress message and tried to turn back.

The small French-built craft somersaulted through the air before crashing about one mile north of the airport, just blocks from the Costa Mesa Freeway. Officials said no one on the ground was injured.

“The plane dropped like a rock out of the sky,” said Ivan Nguyen, a stock worker at Physician Sales Service, a nearby business. “When it hit, the earth shook like an earthquake. The plane made a whistling sound and then a bang, like fireworks.”

Nguyen and a friend ran to the building where the plane had crashed and climbed to the roof, but the craft had plunged inside. “We wanted to try to help someone,” Nguyen said. “But the whole plane was on fire.”

Two of the bodies were found in the cockpit, and the third was apparently ejected in the crash, Orange County fire officials said. It was unclear to authorities what the plane’s destination was.

Officials from the National Transportation Safety Board began studying the crash but had no comment on preliminary findings or a possible cause.

Witnesses in and around the Baxter International biomedical complex, which makes cardiovascular devices, said the plane came in low and fast, bursting into flames as it ripped through the roof of a Baxter warehouse in an industrial park along McGaw Avenue.

The fire engulfed the small plane, which was painted bright yellow, and touched off a blaze that caused heavy damage to a storage area in the warehouse.

No employees were in the immediate area of the crash, said Randal Woodgruff, Baxter vice president of manufacturing.

Because the crash occurred during a shift change at Baxter, dozens of workers leaving and entering the building witnessed it.

“I heard a loud explosion, and everybody ran, and the alarm sounded,” said Van Vu, 26, a Garden Grove resident who works in a device assembly building next to the crash site. “It was really scary.”

Another employee, Phuong Nguyen, 27, of Garden Grove, said she was leaving the building when she heard the drone of the plane and saw it skimming the rooftops of the Baxter complex.

“It was really loud because it was so close,” she said. “But I don’t think I saw any smoke.”

One wing of the plane tore off on impact and landed in a computer room adjoining the warehouse. The fuselage crashed into a storage area containing cardboard and paper items that quickly caught fire, officials said.

Though the plane resembled a vintage British fighter, it was probably manufactured in France in the 1960s or 1970s as a training craft, NTSB officials said.

Amid the smoking wreckage, decorative red stars that had been painted along the fuselage were still visible Saturday afternoon as firefighters sifted through debris for any remaining jet fuel.

The Baxter facility in Irvine includes half a dozen buildings, among them the medical supplies warehouse and a factory that employs about 350 people. Baxter is a global health-care company based in Deerfield, Ill.