1 Dies, 1 Hurt in Grapevine Plane Crash

The pilot of a single-engine plane was killed and his passenger was critically injured when the aircraft crashed in a pasture west of the Golden State Freeway in Gorman on Monday, authorities said.

The plane went down at 8:11 a.m. about 150 yards from the freeway.

Moments before the crash, the plane was flying low and dipping its wings from side to side as though the pilot may have been trying to land on the freeway or on a nearby road. The plane’s propeller was not turning, said Ellen Pace, 42, of Gorman.

“He was coming straight up the Grapevine from the south, flying really low and wobbling,” Pace said. “He was about 200 feet above the traffic. My first thought was, ‘What’s a crop-duster doing around here? There are no crops to dust.’ Then I thought, ‘No. He’s in trouble.’ The propeller on the front wasn’t turning.”

Pace, a dispatcher for Ridge Route Towing in Gorman, said she was driving south on Peace Valley Road parallel to the freeway when the plane flew over her, missing her car by about 10 feet.

“I thought, ‘That guy’s going to land on this road,’ so I speeded up so it wouldn’t land on me,” she said. “It almost skid-marked across my car. He went right over me. It was close enough that I ducked my head.”

Pilot Kevin Weil, 38, of Ridgefield, Wash., and passenger James McBee, 53, of Milwaukie, Ore., were flown by air ambulance to Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital in Valencia, where Weil died. McBee was listed in critical condition late Monday with head and chest injuries, hospital officials said.

Married and the father of two young children, Weil was a careful, experienced pilot who had logged 1,150 hours of flight time, his wife, Misty, said from the family home in Washington.

“He’s been flying a long time. I just don’t understand how this could happen,” she said.

McBee and Weil, who were business associates, left Thursday on a pleasure trip, said McBee’s son, Sean, in a telephone interview from the family’s home in Oregon.

The plane reportedly took off less than an hour before the crash from Fox Field in Lancaster, although officials there could not confirm that.

Officials of the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration investigated the crash site Monday, but have yet to determine what caused the plane to go down. The weather in the Grapevine area Monday morning was cool and cloudy with no ground fog, said Los Angeles County fire officials who responded to the crash.

Weil was flying a four-seat, 1973 Piper PA28-140, a popular plane, said Mark Platt, an investigator for Textron Lycoming, the engine’s manufacturer.

“It’s like the Volkswagen of airplanes,” said Platt, who was at the scene to assist federal investigators. “We’ll look at man, machine and environment to determine what happened.”