Friday, February 29, 2008
Pilot
in Riverside crash is called a hero
By Victoria Kim
The
Los Angeles (CA) Times
![Plane Crash]()
![Riverside plane crash kills 3]()
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Federal and local
authorities investigate the scene of a plane crash this morning in Riverside.
Two people and the pilot were killed when the private plane crashed into a
residential area the night before.
Resident says plane
losing altitude on takeoff swerved to miss homes, people.
The lights from the plane were heading right at Steve Kiser, and
there was no time to run.
"I was standing out there with my buddies, and I'm saying, 'That just
don't look right, dude,' " said the 46-year-old Riverside trucker.
Kiser
was drinking a beer on his front lawn, about to call it a night. Instead, he
was caught, by his own account, like a deer in the headlights.
The plane was losing altitude. It abruptly swerved left, barely missing power
lines and rooftops, before crashing into the street less than 25 feet away,
killing the pilot and two passengers.
"As the plane crumbled into the ground, it was a fraction of a second, and
then it was just whoof!" said Kiser who has lived near Riverside Municipal
Airport for 18 years.
"It was so big coming at you, you just figure running wasn't an
option," he said.
Kiser felt the blazing heat from the explosion, which sent two palm trees up in
flames. Embers flew in all directions. A vehicle parked on the street was
destroyed.
It was several moments before he realized how close he had come to death.
The single-engine four-seat plane crashed shortly after takeoff about 10 p.m.
Wednesday in the 8700 block of Pembroke Avenue, less than half a mile from the
airport.
Authorities said the pilot narrowly missed homes and people on the
palm-tree-lined street.
"There were people that were outside very near the impact point. It is
amazing and lucky that it didn't hurt anybody on the ground," said Patrick
Jones, a National Transportation Safety Board investigator who was on the scene
Thursday morning to begin a joint inquiry with the Federal Aviation
Administration into the cause of the crash.
Riverside County officials late Thursday had not released the names of any of
the crash victims.
Most of the plane was intact, and the victims' bodies were badly burned, said
Riverside Fire Department spokesman Mike Fisher.
At the time of the accident, the control tower at the airport, which handles a
large volume of corporate jet traffic, was unmanned because it closes about 8
p.m.
The plane appeared to have landed in Riverside about 8:30 p.m. after taking off
from Corona Municipal Airport. It was headed back to Corona when it crashed,
Jones said.
As the plane took off, Kiser was outside his home talking to a friend of his
son and had a clear view of the runway. He thought something was wrong
immediately because he had never seen that runway used for takeoffs.
On Thursday, authorities said the runway in question, the smaller of the two at
the airport, is rarely used by local pilots.
The aircraft that crashed, a Mooney M20C, is registered to Randall Emry of
Mission Viejo. Emry's wife answered the phone at the couple's home Thursday and
said her husband was not involved in the accident.
The woman, who declined to give her name, said that she did not know the pilot
of the plane but that he was an associate of her husband and a certified pilot.
"It's our plane, and we have partners that fly it from time to time,"
she said. "We've always known the risk of going up. It's a single-engine
plane, so you always have those types of risks as opposed to getting on
commercial jetliners."
For his part, Kiser praised the pilot's actions, noting that many of his
neighbors were already in for the night and would have had no warning of
danger.
"If he'd been just a second longer, he would've come right into my yard.
He definitely did the heroic thing," he said. "It's sad that he died,
but what he did, he probably saved a ton of people."
