Plane Flips, Falls; Student Pilot Killed

A 49-year-old student pilot was killed Tuesday when his rented Cessna flipped and crashed on approach to John Wayne Airport.

Investigators are focusing on the possibility that wake turbulence from a 757 jet that had landed a few minutes earlier caused the crash, said Richard Parker, an investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board in Los Angeles.

The Cessna 152 was coming in for a landing shortly after 5 p.m. when it suddenly plummeted to the ground upside down, Parker said. The plane’s behavior was “consistent with a wake turbulence accident,” he said, although investigators have not ruled out anything.

The pilot, who was alone in the Cessna, had not been identified, pending notification of relatives. An airport spokeswoman said he was a resident of Laguna Niguel.

Parker said wake turbulence creates a powerful “horizontal tornado” that could upset a small plane. In most cases, he said, pilots are able to avoid such conditions after air traffic controllers warn them. He said he did not know what happened in this case, or whether the pilot had been warned.

“It’s reasonable to expect that a student pilot would have been trained” on how to avoid wake turbulence, he said. “We will be looking at the flight data recorder in the larger plane.”

A witness, Martha Leal, 24, said it appeared that the Cessna pilot intentionally dove to the ground to avoid a larger airplane that was taxiing across its path. Parker said he had “no information to confirm or deny that.”

The pilot, who had a learner’s license and apparently had been flying for about a year, rented the plane from a company at the airport for Tuesday’s practice flight. The pilot, Parker said, had been in touch with an instructor on the ground during the flight.

Leal, who saw the crash from the McDonald’s in a nearby terminal where she works, said, “It was terrible. People ran to the windows so they could see everything,” many grabbing their cell phones to call for help. A pregnant woman, she said, was so upset by the sight she became sick and had to be taken to the hospital.

“A lot of people were upset and scared,” she said. “I got scared too. This is the first time I’ve seen a crash, and I hope my last. “

Another witness, who declined to give her name, said, “Everybody screamed at the same time. All I saw was the dirt flying up in the air.”

Parker said he expected the downed aircraft, surrounded by firetrucks and sheriff’s vehicles, to remain on the grass near the end of the runway through most of Tuesday night. By early today, he said, he expected it to be moved to a hangar for investigation.

Airport operations were not affected by the crash, authorities said.