Neighborhood Knows Plane Crashes Well

For a father of four who has watched airplanes fall out of the sky around Whiteman Airport for 40 years, Thursday’s fatal crash could easily have been the last.

George Leal was sleeping in one room when the plane slammed into an adjacent bedroom, bursting into fire. Typically, his children would have been in the room watching television.

Two passengers in the plane were killed and the pilot critically injured as the 6:15 p.m. crash ignited two homes, but everyone on the ground escaped harm.

“That was one of our lucky days,” Leal said Friday, recounting that his wife and each of the children had been in different rooms at the time of the crash. He could hear the lone survivor screaming: “Open the door! Open the door!”

Surveying the damage to his house directly under the flight path of the busy general aviation airport in Pacoima, Leal said, “It could have been far worse. I’m just glad all my family is OK.”

The crash was at least the sixth in the neighborhood in the last 15 months, including another double fatality in March.

Federal officials on Friday were unable to determine the cause of the crash, which occurred just moments after takeoff. Investigator Tom Armstrong of the National Transportation Safety Board said the plane will be taken apart, then reassembled in an attempt to determine what went wrong.

Authorities still had not released names of the victims by late Friday.

Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alarcon said Friday he will again call for a federal investigation of safety issues around the airport.

“I want to stay on top of this,” Alarcon said, adding that he will ask Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky to also seek an investigation into accidents around the county-owned airport.

In a similar study last spring, Federal Aviation Administration officials concluded that accidents at Whiteman are no higher than normal at most urban airports. “I intend to follow up with that,” Alarcon said.

News accounts reported 17 crashes involving Whiteman in the last 10 years, including six people killed in six years, none of them on the ground. However, not all aircraft incidents capture the attention of the media. For example, the FAA investigated two crash landings at Whiteman, in July and August, that were not reported in the media. No one was injured in those accidents.

Airport officials said incidents involving airports may exaggerate perceived dangers. Pilots who experience trouble while traversing the San Fernando Valley may head for Whiteman as the closest refuge “because the airport just happens to be there,” said Ted Gustin, aviation division chief for the county Department of Public Works, which oversees the county’s five general aviation airports.

“There’s a lot of misconceptions about safety,” said Gustin, who was airport manager at Whiteman from 1972 to 1984. “Aircraft are mechanical and things happen.”

The 189-acre Whiteman field was privately owned until the county purchased it in 1970. Operation of all five of the county’s airports was contracted over in 1991 to a private firm called Comarco. The FAA towers at the airports are staffed by another contractor, an international company called Serco. About 560 aircraft are based at Whiteman.

In 1989, an air traffic control tower was built at Whiteman, where pilots previously had flown in and out on their own. Then three years ago, the county made major safety improvements to the runway, making it wider and longer and smoothing out a hump in the center that previously had obscured pilots’ views from one end of the runway to the other.

“I can understand the neighbors’ concerns,” Gustin said. “But I don’t believe the statistics support their fears.”

The Leal family spent most of the day Friday trying to salvage whatever they could from their charred house before it was boarded up by authorities.

Sandra Leal, 14, packed up her First Communion dress, jewelry and her schoolbooks and notebooks.

“I’m shocked and sad,” she said. “I’ve been living here all my life and now I have to move.” Her sisters, Georgina, 15, and Sylvia, 18, recovered jewelry, clothes and some coins.

The crash occurred about 6:15 p.m. Thursday, when the four-seater Ryan Navion tore through a bedroom of the Leal family home on Hoyt Street, where they have lived for 20 years. George Leal had lived in the Pacoima neighborhood surrounding the airport for a previous 20 years before purchasing the house on Hoyt.

Leal, who works the graveyard shift at a Los Angeles produce warehouse, was napping in the back bedroom when the plane hit.

Dazed, he ran out of the room. He remembers looking back at debris in his house that he didn’t recognize.

“I heard a noise. I thought it was an earthquake,” he said. “I heard the screams--one was saying open the windows to let the gas out. I didn’t see them die, I just heard their voices.”

Seconds later, the plane exploded and George Leal ran out of the house. His wife, three daughters and son were already outside.

The fire destroyed three bedrooms, the garage and a bathroom. The rooms were still soaked from water from the fire hoses Friday. All that remains are charred belongings and ashes.

Only the living room and most of the kitchen were unscathed.

Benjamin Salcedo, 33, who lives next door to the Leals, said he was in his back yard when he looked up and saw the plane trying to elevate. He said he noticed how quiet the plane was, as if the engine wasn’t working. The plane appeared to be attempting to turn back toward the airport when it began to float toward the ground. A 10-year resident of the neighborhood, he said he knew what was about to happen.

“I didn’t know which way to run when I saw it coming. My wife said, ‘It’s going to fall on us, it’s going to fall on us.’ ”

He said he fell to the ground and watched as the plane crashed into the Leal house.

“I lived here for so long, but I thought yesterday was my last day,” Salcedo said.

Neighbors were angry that yet another plane had crash-landed in their neighborhood and vowed to sign petitions seeking a halt to student pilots who use Whiteman Airport. Crashes in May and July of 1996 involved student pilots.

No one was home in another house hit by the plane in Thursday’s accident.

“We’ve been living here for so many years and it’s getting out of hand,” said Angie Reynoso, 30, who surveyed the damage done to the home she shares with her mother, sister, her children and her sister’s children.

“We’re going to go to the City Council and tell them they should stop having the airport teach student pilots where there are houses,” she said.

“They should have taken away the airport since the first accident,” added her relative, Aurelio Reynoso, 24.

“There hasn’t been that many fatalities (of people on the ground) but it’s been more luck” than anything else, he said.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Whiteman-Area Crashes

Shown below are crashes of small aircraft within the last two years in the vicinity of Whiteman Airport.

(1) March 4, ‘95: Plane crash-landed in field and hit a tree. Minor injuries to two people on board.

(2) July 28, ‘95: Plane crashed into a vacant commercial structure. Two people died.

(3) May 18, ‘96: Plane landed on Hansen Dam Golf Course, 15th tee. Three people, no injuries.

(4) July 15, ‘96: Student pilot crash-landed in frontyard of home.

(5) March 15, ‘97: Plane crashed into a tree in backyard of home. Two people died.

(6) Sept. 25, ‘97: Plane crashed into two houses. Two people on board die.

Source: Los Angeles Fire Department