Preliminary Report on Plane Crash Issued

The two planes that collided in midair over a golf course here last week had both contacted the Van Nuys Airport control tower and had been assigned electronic codes so they could be tracked on radar, investigators said Monday.

The finding was included in a preliminary report issued by the National Transportation Safety Board and is the first official account of the Feb. 7 collision that killed four people. It details the circumstances of the accident but does not assign any blame.

The report posted on the NTSB Web site said controllers were tracking one of the planes--a Bellanca Scout--at the time of the accident. The other plane, a Questair Venture, had contacted controllers and had been assigned a transponder code so it could also be tracked.

It was not clear from the preliminary report whether the Questair pilot had input the code before the crash occurred, or whether controllers were actually tracking the Questair. NTSB officials declined comment, as did officials with the Federal Aviation Administration, which operates the Van Nuys control tower.

Both planes were operating under visual flight rules that require them to watch for and avoid other aircraft.

“Even though they are in contact with an air traffic control tower, the pilots still are responsible for the separation of traffic, to see and to avoid,” said Drew Steketee, vice president of communications for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Assn., an industry group that is not involved in the investigation.

Steketee speculated that the accident may have occurred before the pilot of the Questair had a chance to punch in the transponder code aboard his aircraft, and as a result his plane may not have been identifiable on the radar screen.

The NTSB report said that after Questair pilot Charles Oliver verified the code, “there was no further conversation with either plane.”

The report said Bellanca pilot Thomas Quist and his co-pilot, Kevin Kaff, were circling over a construction site looking for possible leaks in a pipeline at the time of the collision. Oliver and his passenger, Jean Bustos, were headed for a landing at Van Nuys Airport.

All four were killed in the crash at 9:50 a.m. Their identities were confirmed late last week by the Los Angeles County coroner’s office after dental records were examined, Scott Carrier, the coroner’s spokesman, said Monday.

Quist, 45, and Kaff, 22, both of Bakersfield, were flying in a 1974 Bellanca Scout, a tandem-seat high-wing aircraft typically used for industrial surveillance such as checking pipelines.

Oliver, 53, of Glendora, a professional pilot who flew large executive aircraft, was flying his recently purchased kit airplane, a 1999 Questair Venture, with his friend Bustos, 64, of La Verne. Bustos held a private pilot’s certificate.

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The Bellanca was circling to the left about 600 feet above a construction site adjacent to the Cascades Golf Club “where earth movers were moving dirt,” investigators wrote. “The construction site’s location was 6.3 miles north of the airport and in line with the localizer [extended centerline] to the active runway 16R.”

Quist contacted the tower at 9:42, saying he would be flying over the area “for about five minutes,” the NTSB report says. He was assigned a transponder code, which allows controllers to see the exact location and altitude of an airplane.

Six minutes later, Oliver contacted the tower and was told “to make a straight-in approach to runway 16R,” the report says. He too was then assigned a transponder code.

Steketee and others said the configuration of the planes could have blocked the pilots’ views of one another. The Bellanca, angled and with the wings above the pilots, may have blocked the view of the fast-moving Questair, which has low wings that partially obscure a pilot’s view of lower objects. In addition, the pilots in the Bellanca were probably concentrating on looking down at the excavation over the pipeline, he said.

The precise cause of the accident is not expected to be released until the NTSB completes its investigation and issues a final report, which could take months and possibly a year or more.

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Times staff writer Andrew Blankstein contributed to this story.