Flying a Passion of Burned Pilot

He designs NASA spacecraft during the week, plays in a symphony orchestra on weekends and was on the threshold of possibly becoming an astronaut, but instead of heading into orbit Jordan A. Kaplan is just fighting to stay alive today since surviving a fiery light plane crash that killed a woman companion.

Kaplan, 32, of Pasadena, also played in several string quartets, had taken up swing dancing and was known as a gourmet cook.

“Jordan is one of those people who does not need three hours at the end of each day to sit around on the couch and watch TV,” said Randy Lindemann, a friend and fellow engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

“He was always going.”

“The two loves in his life are music and flying,” said David Bendett, executive director of the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra, in which Kaplan had been a violinist for about five years. “He would always be talking about flying here and flying there.”

In addition to his engineering and musical careers, Kaplan was an astronaut candidate. He had advanced far in a previous round of astronaut selection before being eliminated and was planning to reapply, said Paul Hardy, a fellow JPL engineer.

Kaplan remained in critical condition Monday at the Grossman Burn Center at Sherman Oaks Hospital, where he is being treated for third-degree burns over 92% of his body. The Los Angeles County coroner’s office was awaiting dental records to confirm the identity of the woman killed in the crash.

Meanwhile, Kaplan’s friends and family, who had arrived from Massachusetts, remained by his bedside, and blood donations were being sought from the public.

The crash occurred only about half a mile from Whiteman Airport in Pacoima, where Kaplan and the woman took off in a vintage single-engine plane shortly before 3 p.m. Saturday. Authorities believe Kaplan was piloting the 1946 Ercoupe 415 when it crashed into a vacant home.

An investigator from the National Transportation Safety Board spent Monday going through the plane’s wreckage, which was taken to Compton for investigation.

Kaplan worked at JPL as a mechanical engineer on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which is scheduled to be launched on a mission to Saturn this fall, and earlier helped design the Pathfinder, which is now in space, on its way to Mars.

Kaplan helped design platforms on the Cassini spacecraft upon which instruments were mounted, said Mary Beth Murrill, a JPL spokeswoman. Prior to the crash, Kaplan was preparing to move temporarily to Cape Canaveral to prepare the spacecraft for launch.

“He is a very intelligent and talented engineer,” said Hardy, an electrical engineer at JPL who worked with Kaplan on the Cassini spacecraft. “He was very excited about what he was going to be experiencing at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and seeing his hardware get off the ground.”

Kaplan was also a founding member of the Holliston string quartet, which later became the Holliston trio, named after the street where Kaplan lived in a guest house and where he would hold practice in preparation for the group’s appearances at weddings and bar mitzvahs.

During lunch hours at JPL, he and several colleagues played their instruments together in the quad, Hardy said.

Before joining JPL in 1991, Kaplan received a BS in mechanical engineering from Tufts University in 1986 and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990.

Kaplan learned to fly in Boston about six years ago and often took the Ercoupe to “fly-ins” for antique planes, and would use it for weekend visits to Mammoth Mountain or San Francisco, Lindemann said.

Friends said Kaplan did a lot of his own work on the plane. “It was in immaculate condition,” Lindemann said.

“You got to be concerned about corrosion control, but a lot of these planes, if they’re maintained properly, could go on flying indefinitely,” said Mike Sellers of Univair Aircraft Corp. of Aurora, Colo., which still supplies parts for the Ercoupe.

Many of Kaplan’s colleagues at JPL and fellow orchestra members also donated blood for him over the weekend. When the orchestra performs its second-to-last concert of the season at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on Sunday, the performance will probably be dedicated to Kaplan, Bendett said.

“We’re all really grieving over this,” Bendett said. “It’s just a terrible, terrible tragedy and we’re just hoping and praying he’ll pull through.”