Friends Gather to Remember Pilot Killed in Crash

When Andrew J. Lowe’s single engine Piper Malibu crashed into a strip mall on May 28 just moments after takeoff from Hawthorne Airport, it sent airplane owners from Van Nuys to Compton reeling.

And not just because every pilot could imagine himself in Lowe’s place.

Lowe was a member of the California Black Aviation Assn., a tight-knit group of pilots who fly together from airports in Hawthorne, Compton and Van Nuys to places like Cabo San Lucas and Las Vegas.

The organization was founded in the late 1970s by a group of black pilots, including World War II fighter pilots who were shut out of jobs as commercial pilots after the war because of their skin color. In addition to owning and flying their own planes, the pilots have dedicated themselves to opening the skies to children in poor urban areas of Los Angeles.

Though he had only joined the group in January, Lowe was an inspiration to many members, said club President Jack Crusor.

Lowe’s was a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps immigrant story. Born in St. Andrews, Barbados, he came to Los Angeles in 1979 and founded a successful car repair business. He bought a million-dollar airplane, which he kept at Hawthorne Airport for weekend getaways and longer trips home to visit family in the Caribbean.

Though swamped with the demands of his business, he was always ready to lend a tool, mechanical advice or just a sympathetic smile, friends said.

On May 28, he became the only member of the association ever to die in a plane crash. He and two friends, Adrianne Taylor and Paula Hines-Ferguson, took off at 11:58 a.m. from Hawthorne, bound for Las Vegas, where they were going to meet other club members to celebrate Memorial Day.

For reasons that have not been determined, the plane fell from the sky and plowed into a parking lot less than half a mile from the airport, bursting into flames as it hit a power transformer.

“You have to accept it. It’s one of those things that happen,” said Crusor, who came to Lowe’s memorial service Saturday with about half of the club’s 60 members.

“All the members loved Andrew, and loved flying with him,” he told friends and family at the service.

Crusor remembered one trip not long ago when half a dozen planes flew in a convoy to Cabo San Lucas.

“There was a slow group and a fast group. Andy flew with the fast group. He flew at about 20,000 feet while the rest of us were at 8,000 feet,” he said with a laugh. “We will never forget you.”

Crusor said the pilots are shaken by Lowe’s death, but they don’t intend to let it stop the club’s mission.

Lowe would have wanted it that way, friends and family members said.

“At the end, Andrew’s spirit truly did fly,” his friend Carol Johnson told mourners, adding that what they loved about Lowe was his generosity and dedication to his community.

And that, said Lang Stanley, a club founder, is the true mission of the association.

Stanley, 69, always wanted to be a commercial pilot. But when he graduated from high school in the late 1940s, blacks were decades from being allowed to pilot commercial planes. So he took a job as a counselor at San Jose State University and became an advisor to the school’s aviation club.

By the time he moved back to Los Angeles in the 1970s, he had bought his own airplane, which he kept at the Compton airport.

He often talked with other black pilots at the airport, including former World War II fighter pilots who had not been able to get jobs with the airlines when they got home. The fighter pilots, called the Tuskegee Airmen because they trained in Tuskegee, Ala., never lost a bomber they escorted during the war.

“The airlines were hurting for pilots so bad, but rather than hire these Tuskegee Airmen, they went back to Washington and looked through the archives and found pilots who had flunked out of [Army] flight school and retrained them rather than hire blacks. It’s crazy,” Stanley said.

As they discussed the discrimination they had faced and the battles to change it, the pilots hatched an idea: They would use their airplanes and skills to inspire black youngsters to overcome the odds facing them.

“When we got the club together, we were trying to tell black youngsters: ‘You can learn to fly,’ ” Stanley said.

“And so every time a little kid comes by my airplane, particularly if they are a black youngster, I will tell them what this does, and what that does, and bring them up into the plane and show them the controls,” Stanley said.

“Looking back is great,” said Tuskegee Airman Charles Foreman. “But looking ahead is what it’s about, and it’s all about the kids.”