A Look Back: 1985 - Pilot, 27, had no aviation training

Police were mystified at first when they discovered the bodies of a man and a woman inside a single-engine airplane that crashed a few hundred yards off Newport Pier early one morning in 1985.

The Cessna 152 plunged into the ocean about 2 a.m. on Feb. 26. Neither Richard Brownell, 27, nor Sandra O’Grady, 25, had a pilot’s license, or had any type of aviation training.

Divers from the Orange County Harbor Patrol and Newport Beach lifeguards found Brownell, a self-employed landscaper from Anaheim, still strapped in the pilot’s seat of the aircraft. O’Grady was found floating inside the cockpit of the plane.

The woman’s co-workers from her cocktail waitressing job at a Westminster bar told investigators she left work to go flying with two men the night of the crash.

“There were only two seats in that plane, but ... I suppose a third person could fit in there,” Alan Crawford, an investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, told the Los Angeles Times in an article dated Feb. 28, 1985.

Investigators later found a car belonging to 30-year-old Kevin Eiseminger, an engineer for McDonnell Douglas Corp., parked near the plane’s tie-down spot at John Wayne Airport. Eiseminger was nowhere to be found after the crash — his relatives hadn’t seen or heard from him in days.

A student pilot, Eiseminger was a member of a group called the Flying Club, which had a lease for the plane. Eiseminger had flown the plane before and would have had access to it, but club members said he had made no reservation to fly the aircraft the night of the crash.

There were no more clues to Eiseminger’s fate until his body washed up on a local beach on March 21, 1985.

Investigators theorized O’Grady was sitting in the cargo area of the plane when it crashed. Eiseminger was in the passenger seat of the aircraft, giving Brownell instructions on how to fly.

The Orange County coroner’s office determined that Eiseminger had been drinking the night of the crash and had a blood-alcohol level of .15.