First the Tears, Then Questions

The eight-year companion of a pilot killed last month in a foggy crash-landing at Van Nuys Airport has been grappling for weeks with a question, she says: Why did the body of Robert A. Olson lay undiscovered in the wreckage for more than four hours?

“How can a plane crash in the middle of L.A. and nobody know about it?” asked Jeanne Harris of Vancouver, Wash., a divorced mother who said Olson served as a father figure to her two teenage children.

“It is ludicrous, inexcusable, that one of the world’s busiest airports can’t justify having controllers in the tower around the clock,” added Harris, 40, who said she has taken possession of Olson’s ashes and the clothes he wore in the fatal accident.

“I know he did not die when he hit the runway,” Harris said this week, citing the tire skid marks indicating the pilot attempted to stop the plane before it plowed into a cluster of five parked aircraft.

“I’m trying to find out how much time did we have. If we even had half an hour [after the crash], someone should have been there. I lost someone very, very dear to me, but I am also concerned about public safety and pilot safety. This didn’t need to happen.”

The Los Angeles County coroner’s office has declared that Olson, 32, died almost immediately after the crash or within minutes from “multiple blunt force injuries.”

A preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board attributed the 1:19 a.m. crash on Nov. 14 to “a loss of control during a missed approach” as heavy fog rolled into the airport. The fog had caused Olson to divert from Burbank Airport, where he had planned to land with a cargo of 224 pounds of bank checks from Las Vegas.

The autopsy found no indication of drugs or alcohol, nor any medical reason why the pilot missed the runway by 525 feet, nosed into a taxiway, then slid into the parked airplanes.

Incoming planes had been diverted from Burbank Airport that night because traffic controllers there said the fog was too thick to permit safe landings. There were no reports from Van Nuys Airport, because the control tower was closed, as it is every night between 10:45 p.m. and 5:45 a.m., and information on fog conditions was passed only by individual pilots talking to federal air traffic controllers in San Diego.

Olson--who had crashed once before, about 10 years ago while taking off in a heavy fog in Hillsboro, Ore.--was piloting a plane owned by AEX Air of Mesa, Ariz., a small air cargo transport company.

A ground crew that was supposed to meet the plane at Burbank to pick up the checks learned about the diversion to Van Nuys from federal air traffic controllers, said AEX President Gale Webb. But the accident went undiscovered until about 5:30 a.m., after the heavy fog obscuring the 730-acre field began to lift.

A final NTSB report, which may take six months to a year to complete, is expected to address the question of why the accident went undiscovered for so long.

Both the airplane that crashed and the aircraft it slammed into should have emitted emergency radio locater signals that wouldhave triggered search and rescue efforts, officials said. That apparently didn’t happen and the reasons are still under investigation, officials said.

Harris said it was a mutual love of aviation that brought her and Olson together: She was a skydiving enthusiast and Olson a pilot for skydivers. She helped support him through a variety of jobs while he accumulated the more than 3,000 hours of flight time he needed to qualify as a commercial pilot. In turn, he encouraged her when she started her own computer business several years ago.

Harris, who said she serves on local civic advisory boards, said the family shared a love of flying, gardening and photography. Even though Olson was based in Las Vegas, he regularly flew home on weekends and called home daily when he was away during the week.

“He raised the kids since they were little tykes,” Harris said of her children, Stacey, 16, and Jeff, 14.

“It’s still hard for me to comprehend that he’s never going to come home.”

More than 200 people attended the memorial service for Olson in his home town of Medford, Ore., where his parents and younger brother live. In her eulogy, Harris described Olson as “a calculated risk taker. He would not do something that involved risk without proper preparation.”

In his last call to Harris just a few hours before he died, Olson cut his conversation short because he said he needed to check weather conditions for the flight.

“Good night,” they told each other.

“We made a pact years ago that we would never say ‘goodbye,’ ” Harris said.