Pilot’s Friend Recounts Incidents Prior to Crash

The wife of a pilot who died when his plane crashed Sunday got off the aircraft in the Antelope Valley just before the fatal accident because she was afraid to fly to Van Nuys, a family friend said Monday.

Charles C. Gray of Sherman Oaks, who operated a dental laboratory in Los Angeles, landed the twin-engine Cessna at Fox Field to allow his wife, Myrtle, to remain behind because she was afraid of flying and did not like the overcast weather, said the friend, who asked not to be identified. Gray told his wife that he would continue to Van Nuys Airport, get the family car and drive back to pick her up.

But as the plane flew over a Saugus neighborhood about 6:30 p.m. Sunday, residents said, they heard a sputtering noise and saw pieces of the aircraft fly off before it went into a steep dive and crashed into a high-voltage transmission tower, killing the two people aboard.

The passenger, a male acquaintance of the couple who had flown with them from Arizona, had not been positively identified by late Monday, a coroner’s spokesman said.

Gray was described by friends as an avid flyer who also worked as a volunteer in search and rescue missions to locate missing aircraft. He also developed a quadrant system used by rescue teams to search a large area of terrain from the air.

In the meantime, residents of the neighborhood where the plane crashed were calling the pilot a hero Monday. Wreckage from the plane was strewn in the yards of four homes, but no one was injured.

“We were so lucky, we had angels living with us yesterday,” Kathy Shea said as she viewed the pieces of a fuel tank and an airplane door scattered about her backyard. She had called in her husband and granddaughter for dinner just seconds before the wreckage hit, she said.

In a corner of the yard, near a gazebo, lay the mangled remnants of two Barbie dolls her granddaughter had left behind.