Suspected pilot had seizure before crash

Press, 3 September 1986, Page 8

Suspected pilot had seizure before crash

NZPA-Reuter Los Angeles The man believed to be the pilot of a small plane that was sin a collision with an Aeromexico DCS that killed up to 77 people had a heart attack, a coroner’s spokesman said. Evidence was disclosed that the single-engine Piper light aircraft may have' been flying in an approach path to Los Angeles International airport without official clearance. The leader of a National Transportation Safety Board Investigation, Dr John Lauber, also said he had made a fairly routine request for drug tests to be conducted on air controllers on duty when the planes collided. The Mexican airliner, with 58 passengers and a crew of six, and the private aircraft, with three occupants, collided and crashed on the Los Angeles suburb of Cerritos on Monday. All aboard both planes were killed.

The police said that up to 10 people on the ground were also killed when flaming debris and aviation fuel gutted nine houses and damaged seven.

Rescue teams, using small hand-tools to avoid disturbing evidence, are going through the blackened rubble looking for remnants of victims.

The Los Angeles coroner’s spokesman, Bill Gold, said a post-mortem examination on a man in his 50s, believed to have been the pilot of the private plane, had showed he died of multiple injuries but that a heart attack was a contributing factor to his death. Asked whether the man, who has not been identified, had had the heart attack before he suffered the injuries, Mr Gold said: "It is indicative he had the heart attack first.” Witnesses said all three people aboard the small plane were decapitated.

Speculation on why the plane was in the airport flight path has increased, and there is criticism that the airways over Los Angeles are overcrowded. Airport officials said Los Angeles has 15 planes taking off or landing simultaneously. They said Los Angeles International airport has 680,000 landings and take-offs a year, and the nearby Van Nuys airport, which handles private planes, has just as many. Asked whether the pilot of the small plane was in touch with the Los Angeles control-tower as the airliner came in to land, Dr Lauber said, “The best information we have available at this point is he (the pilot of the small plane) was not in contact with the appropriate control facility for the T.C.A. (terminal control area) air space. “If he was operating in the terminal control air space, he should have had clearance.”