O.C. Couple Unhurt in Plane Crash

A Newport Beach pilot crash landed at the Ventura fairgrounds Thursday after his single-engine airplane unexpectedly lost power.

Susan and Tom McCormick were shaken but uninjured in the 3:45 p.m. crash, which Susan McCormick said “sure beats Magic Mountain.”

Tom McCormick was flying the Cessna 210 from the Chino airport to Susan’s parents’ home in Santa Maria for the weekend. But somewhere above the Ventura hills, they said, the motor quit.

“We were in the hills and he kept saying, ‘Look for a strip,’ because everything around was winding,” Susan McCormick said, standing in the fairgrounds parking lot.

“We were going to land on the interstate, but there were too many cars, and the guy at the tower said he didn’t think the beach would be a good idea,” she said. “Then we were here and it was flat and long and straight, but we just had too much speed to avoid the fence.”

The plane landed in a dirt lot designated for overflow parking on the west side of the Ventura Fairgrounds. Deep tire marks could be seen in the dirt in back of the plane, which had ripped through the fence.

If not for the collision with the fence and branches of a nearby tree, the plane would have been undamaged, the couple said.

Relieved to be back on the ground, Susan McCormick said she had been “afraid we would not make it out of this,” even though her husband had remained calm throughout the ordeal.

She said she used her cell phone to call to her sister from the air to tell her that she loved her. But her sister was not home, and as the answering machine beeped, the plane hit the dirt--and she threw the phone to the floor. She joked that her sister would hear the collision on her answering machine.

Susan McCormick said her husband, a partner in a metal fabricating company, had been flying airplanes for about six years. He was going to attend some classes for pilots of Cessna classics in Santa Maria this weekend. She said he will still attend the classes, but they will drive instead of flying.