By Emily Alpert Staff Writer
Gilroy
– Sewage workers pumped foul-smelling fluid out of a
650,000-gallon tank Tuesday, uncovering the bodies of two Japanese
flight students and their instructor still lodged in the
twin-engine plane that bore them to their deaths.
Gilroy – Sewage workers pumped foul-smelling fluid out of a 650,000-gallon tank Tuesday, uncovering the bodies of two Japanese flight students and their instructor still lodged in the twin-engine plane that bore them to their deaths.
The vintage 1964 Beechcraft Travel Air plummeted into a city wastewater tank Monday afternoon, killing its three passengers. Tuesday afternoon, rescue crews couldn’t remove the bodies; the slick floor made it too dangerous, Gilroy Police Sgt. Kurt Svardal said. Instead, a Sacramento-based salvage company planned to lift the entire plane from the tank Wednesday morning, using a Sikorsky helicopter, then extricate the three men.
The flight school where the flight originated from – Nice Air of San Jose – identified the students as Yoshiyuki Kato, 27, and Yasushi Miyata, 38, who were training to pilot multi-engine aircraft such as the Travel Air. Their instructor, Shoki Haraguchi, 26, was a longtime Nice Air employee, specializing in multi-engine planes.
“They were so devoted to learning,” said Vicki Gonzales, office manager at Nice Air. “When I got here at 9am (each day), they were here. When I left at 5pm, they were still here.”
The two students left Japan for the U.S. less than a year ago, eager to soar California skies, Gonzales said. On Monday afternoon, they took off from Reid-Hillview Airport in San Jose at 1pm, and were due back by 5pm.
When the plane tumbled Monday from the air, witnesses described it spiraling, nose-first, toward the ground. A pilot reported seeing a plane falling at about 4pm in Gilroy, initiating an hour-long search for the crash site. Sheriff’s deputies and firefighters combed through dense brush along Llagas Creek and Highway 152 before a sheriff’s helicopter spotted the crash in the 40-foot by 40-foot, 15-foot-deep sewage tank at the South County Regional Wastewater Authority facility off Southside Drive. Thirty minutes later, Nice Air reported the plane missing.
At the city wastewater plant the crash was heard, but not seen, by the few workers on duty. A shattered railing was one of the few signs of the accident, said chief engineer Saeid Vaziry, who described the damage to the plant as “minimal.” On impact, the plane broke into pieces, one wing falling into one tank, the fuselage landing in another.
“It would have been a different story if it were just a few feet off,” said Vaziry. “It’s like it dropped out of the sky into the basin.”
Tuesday, the plant continued to operate as usual, with sewage diverted from the tank into other channels. Little fuel had spilled from the battered plane, Vaziry said, and after the plane is removed, the wastewater tank will be inspected, then refilled with sewage.
Officials from the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration will conduct parallel investigations of the crash. NTSB officials will spend two or three days at the site, NTSB public affairs officer Keith Holloway said, and are expected to post “preliminary factual information” on the agency’s Web site in five or six days. But a full investigation could take as long as a year to complete, using witness statements, air traffic control information, radar, and the contours of fractured metal to determine what caused the crash.
Until an investigation is completed, FAA and NTSB officials said, they can’t speculate on the crash’s cause.
Nice Air owns the 42-year-old twin-engine plane. According to the FAA, the plane hasn’t been involved in any previous accidents or incidents, and Nice Air’s FAA record is clean. The school’s Web site touts the company as “FAA Approved,” a claim that FAA spokesman Ian Gregor said he had “no reason to doubt,” but was unable to verify late Tuesday afternoon.
The Beechcraft Travel Air is “a fairly old model of a twin-engine aircraft,” said Carl Honaker, director of county airports, “a reliable training aircraft” often used by flight schools.
Fatal air accidents are rare: for every 100,000 hours flown in the U.S. in 2005, 1.4 fatal accidents occurred, according to a 2006 Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) report. Even fewer occur in instructional settings. Last year, the NTSB reported only 16 fatal accidents in instructional settings.
“It’s so rare,” said Gonzales, the Nice Air office manager, “that when it does occur, the media immediately want to find out why. But it’s a lot safer than most people think.”
The vast majority of fatal air accidents are caused by pilot error: 83 percent, according to AOPA. Inexperienced pilots make more errors: 43 percent of 2005 air accidents involved pilots with fewer than 100 hours experience in the type of aircraft they were flying. FAA officials said they didn’t know whether Haraguchi or one of his students was piloting the plane when it crashed.
Many foreign nationals travel to the U.S. for flight instruction, Gonzales said. The students who’ve passed through Nice Air’s doors include Koreans, Germans and Indians. California’s mild climate attracts a number of foreign flight students, said Midori Yamamitsu, consul for public affairs at San Francisco’s Consulate General of Japan. Nice Air’s Web site boasts its Spanish-, French-, German- and Japanese-speaking instructors – now minus one well-loved Japanese speaker.
“He was always smiling,” Gonzales said of Haraguchi. “And the students – they loved to fly. I remember when Mr. Kato did his first solo flight. He was so excited when he told his instructor. He was just glowing.”
Emily Alpert covers public safety issues for The Dispatch. She can be reached at 847-7158, or at [email protected].
