Ex-Pilots Solve the Puzzles of Plane Wrecks

Gary Mucho was heading to a weekend football game with his son two months ago when his beeper went off: A small plane had gone down near John Wayne Airport, crashing into a warehouse and killing all three aboard.

Mucho abruptly said goodbye to his son, who was visiting from out of state, and within the hour he was at the crash site, sifting through debris and body parts.

“I was disappointed at missing the football game,” said Mucho, 54, of Los Alamitos. “But my son understood. Airplane accidents happen--we don’t have a schedule.”

As southwest regional director of the National Transportation Safety Board, Mucho’s job is to oversee the mandatory investigations that take place whenever an aircraft crashes in Arizona, Nevada, California, Hawaii or the western Pacific Ocean.

It’s a job demanding the investigative skills of a detective, the reassuring demeanor of a family therapist, the ability to balance administrative duties and the patience to respond to endless media requests.

It’s also a job that requires one to keep a packed bag by the front door.

“We are master jugglers,” Mucho says of the lifestyle to which he and his family have become accustomed.

From an investigative point of view, not all crashes are of equal import, Mucho said. There are the minor “fender benders” that usually can be tracked by telephone.

Then there are the more serious crashes that lead the television news and make passengers jittery.

“If an accident involves fatalities, serious safety concerns or exceptional public interest, we go to the scene,” said Mucho, who works out of a Gardena office along with eight full-time investigators--all former pilots--who handle about 400 crashes a year.

The Orange County crash two months ago involved all three elements. And so it kicked off a meticulous fact-gathering process and analysis that takes roughly nine months from start to finish. Mucho hopes the results will ultimately provide investigators and the public with a clear picture of just what went wrong and how to prevent a similar tragedy in the future.

“Our goal is to generate safety recommendations,” he said. “We have to follow all the tracks.”

In the case of the John Wayne crash, the investigation immediately focused on figuring out who had been aboard and how the plane went down. As firefighters and rescuers battled the blaze caused by the crash, Mucho and fellow investigator Richard B. Parker of Costa Mesa were interviewing witnesses.

Within two hours, investigators identified the plane’s occupants as David R. Hughes, 57, of Cypress; Tina Schroeder, 37, of Newport Beach; and Vandenberg Air Force Base Sgt. David Covell, 48.

Mucho and Parker then questioned the Federal Aviation Administration officials in the control tower for information that would help them piece together the final minutes leading up to the crash: What type of aircraft were they flying? To whom was it registered? What was said by the pilot?

After carefully photographing and charting each piece of debris, investigators issued specific instructions to the Orange County coroner’s office regarding what to look for during the victims’ autopsies.

Did any of the bodies, for example, end up with broken thumbs? That would probably be the pilot, whose hands--presumably--had been tightly gripping the steering wheel upon impact. Breaks in the foot bones could provide another clue as to which set of feet had been pressing on foot pedals.

The presence of smoke in the victims’ windpipes could indicate a cockpit fire while the plane was still airborne.

“It’s a big puzzle, and we’re just getting facts,” Parker said. “Eventually we put all the facts on the table and, hopefully, they make sense to us.”

The next big step in the investigation came a few days after the crash, when Parker located an identical model of the plane that crashed--a French-made four-seat Paris Jet Morane Sauliner 760--in a Long Beach hangar. Parker spent the day familiarizing himself with its controls.

The following day, investigators reassembled the entire wreckage on the floor of a storage facility in Compton to examine the shape of fractures, check out radio and instrument control settings, look at oil and fuel levels, note flap and valve positions and explore possible mechanical problems.

“Every setting is a piece of the picture,” Parker said.

Gradually, as that picture began taking focus, three potentially significant facts emerged. The airplane’s boarding ladder, normally pulled into the cockpit shortly before takeoff, had inadvertently been left dangling outside when the aircraft took off.

Covell, the pilot licensed to fly the craft, was sitting in the co-pilot’s seat while Schroeder, who was licensed only to fly a single-engine plane and not the twin-engine Sauliner, was where the pilot usually sits.

The plane also was flying about three minutes behind a Boeing 757, a type of aircraft that has been linked to wake turbulence--strong winds created by larger airplanes that can sometimes cause smaller aircraft to spin out of control.

These factors may not have had anything to do with the crash, Mucho said. But that decision is ultimately made by Mucho’s colleagues in Washington, who, after reading and analyzing Mucho and Parker’s fact-filled report, are expected to reach a decision about the “probable cause” of the crash sometime this summer.

“We practice disciplined objectivity,” Mucho said of the process.

Maintaining that stance, however, is not always easy.

Grieving families want information that they hope will provide some comfort. Newspaper and television reporters demand immediate answers. Through it all, Mucho said, investigators must avoid jumping to premature conclusions.

“We deliberately understate because we don’t want to put out misleading information,” he said. “It helps to focus on the process. Sometimes it’s tough dealing with the families; they want answers and all we can do is show compassion.”

Like any veteran investigator, Mucho has lots of war stories.

There was the time, for instance, that a small airplane crashed in the center divider of the San Diego Freeway in Long Beach, blocking traffic for several hours. On previous assignments, Mucho spent a Christmas Eve in a Montana field strewn with debris in minus-45-degree weather; climbed the Grand Teton Mountains twice in 10 days in search of separate wrecks; got stuck on a Colorado mountainside overnight in a blizzard with seven dead victims of the crash he was investigating; and spent half a day riding horseback into the New Mexico countryside to the scene of an accident.

Occasionally, efforts to reach a wreckage fail.

“There are crashes we just can’t get to,” Mucho said, “like at the bottom of the ocean or in a crevice in Alaska.”

Usually, though, someone from the National Transportation Safety Board eventually reaches the site of an air disaster and, in time, determines its probable cause.

Mucho’s experience tells him that most accidents result from the actions of pilots rather than mechanical problems in airplanes.

Mucho’s advice: “As a pilot, you should know your personal limitations and the capabilities of your aircraft. As a passenger, don’t be afraid to ask questions.”

Parker added, “Constant vigilance is the price of safety.”

Despite all they’ve seen, however, both men still prefer traveling by air.

“Flying is still one of the safest modes of transportation there is,” Mucho said.

Parker, who is frequently on call, has a more immediate concern.

“The most unsafe thing for me to do is sit down and eat dinner,” he quipped. “The minute I do, my pager goes off and someone has crashed.”