Love of Flying Was Their Common Bond

Tom Quist was an adventure-seeking pilot who fished by seaplane in Alaska and swooped down on rural highways during visits to Iowa. The last 10 years of his life were dedicated to reviving a Bakersfield aviation company with a cursed history.

Kevin Kaff was a 22-year-old aspiring commercial pilot who spent Friday nights working on his own kit plane and “loved being above,” his mother said.

Charles Oliver, a charter jet pilot, had just bought the performance aircraft of his dreams, a lipstick red Questair Venture that cost him $130,000 and could buzz around at 300 mph.

Jean Bustos, an Air Force veteran, was the daughter of a pilot and the widow of an Air Force mechanic, and had logged hundreds of hours in the cockpit herself.

“Flying had been in her family almost all the way back to when flying began,” said Bustos’ nephew, Jerry Hill of Phoenix.

The day after the fatal midair collision near the heavily traveled Newhall Pass, a clearer picture emerged Tuesday of the four victims--Quist and Kaff in a Bellanca Citabria; Oliver and Bustos in Oliver’s experimental Questair Venture.

All four victims shared a love of flying, following a way of life that often put them in small lightweight planes--an exciting pastime that nonetheless carries the risk of death. At the time of Monday’s crash, the two planes were flying under “see and avoid” rules and not relying on radar or air traffic controllers.

Quist, 45, of Bakersfield had logged thousands of hours flying and was meticulous about safety, said Roger Oxborrow, the manager of a small airfield in Paso Robles that Quist often used. A former pilot for American Eagle, Quist owned Patroline Inc., which surveyed pipelines for oil companies including Shell and Mobil. He and Kaff were inspecting a pipeline at the time of the 9:48 a.m. collision.

Patroline has had a history of tragedy. The company was founded by Robert Smoot, a former World War II pilot who died in a crash near Shandon, Calif., in 1954 when his plane clipped a power line, Quist’s business associates said.

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Smoot’s family then sold the business to another pilot, Archie Dean, who also died on the job, suffering a brain aneurysm in 1982 while pushing a small plane out of a hangar in Colorado.

Smoot’s son then ran the business for several years before selling it in 1990 for $100,000 to Tom Quist, a tall, serious pilot with an athlete’s strut and a mind for numbers.

“Tom had the gift of the gab,” his brother, David, said. “He was confident. He was popular. He had the guts to do anything.”

Quist turned Patroline around, hiring more pilots, landing more contracts and moving the business from San Luis Obispo to Bakersfield, which is more central to major pipeline routes. After the fatal 1998 crash of one of his pilots who was surveying pipelines near Gorman, Quist began flying the route himself.

Friends said he had lately talked of selling the business, moving to a farm and spending more time fishing and skiing. He had recently inherited a 3,000-acre corn and soybean farm in western Iowa, where he had summered since he was a boy.

Kaff, an airplane junkie from Bakersfield, was to join the next generation of Patroline pilots. At the time of the crash, he was sitting with Quist in the Bellanca Citabria, learning a pipeline route. About a month ago, he received his commercial pilot’s license and had been flying with Quist for several weeks, his mother said.

“He loved flying, he loved being above, the freedom and the openness of the sky,” said Janice Kaff of Bakersfield.

Janice Kaff could have just as aptly been describing Oliver and Bustos, the two fliers in the plane that collided with her son’s.

The 53-year-old Oliver of Glendora was a charter jet pilot for Petersen Aviation in Van Nuys. He had saved for a decade to buy the Questair Venture, said his wife, Ann. He bought the plane two months ago and had flown it every day since, she said. If he wasn’t at the Brackett Field hangar in La Verne waxing or fixing his planes, she said, he was flying.

“He’d rather fly than breathe,” she said.

Oliver became an aviation aficionado during his Air Force service in Okinawa, Japan, when he went on a demonstration ride.

He had flown for 25 years, training other pilots and shuttling luminaries such as Elizabeth Taylor and Ronald Reagan.

Fellow pilots described Oliver as generous, routinely giving out the combination to the lock on his hangar so others could borrow tools.

“Charlie was always there for you,” said Don Brandt of San Dimas, who had known Oliver for 13 years.

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On Monday morning, as news of the crash hit the airwaves, a family friend saw the tail number of Oliver’s plane on TV and called Oliver’s wife. She refused to believe her husband was hurt.

“I believed he was going to walk through the back door as usual and be fine,” she said in an emotional interview Tuesday.

Bustos, 65, of La Verne was one of Oliver’s former students, and often accompanied him during flights.

Her family history in aviation stretches back to World War I, when her father, John C. Hamilton, was a fighter pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force.

The Hamilton family later moved to Los Angeles, where Bustos was born. She joined the U.S. Air Force in the 1950s, where she met her husband, Trinidad Bustos, an airplane mechanic who was killed when he was struck by a propeller in 1957.

After her husband’s death, Bustos moved to the San Gabriel Valley and worked for the Charter Oak school district in Covina. About 10 years ago, she got her pilot’s license and bought an airplane, her nephew said.

One of her favorite flying buddies was Charlie Oliver.

“They were great friends,” Hill said. “They would go flying at the drop of a hat.”

Bustos owned her own plane for several years and had recently been trained to fly seaplanes. Like Quist, she wanted to take trips to Alaska and land on lakes.

“She wanted to fly all kinds of planes,” Hill said.

“One thing that’s definite,” Hill said. “She loved what she was doing when she died.”

Times staff writers Joe Mozingo, Johnathon E. Briggs and Karen Robinson-Jacobs contributed to this story. Times Community News staffer Pam Noles and Times research librarian Ron Weaver also contributed to this story.

--- UNPUBLISHED NOTE --

The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association advises that the airplane patrolling the pipeline is more properly identified as a Bellanca Scout, omitting Citabria. The National Transportation Safety Board officially refers to the aircraft as a Bellanca, Model 8GCBC.

--- END NOTE ---