Plane Crash-Lands at Fullerton Airport

FULLERTON —  A pilot and his passenger walked away unscathed Tuesday after their single-engine Cessna lost power on takeoff from Fullerton Airport and crash-landed in a field off the runway.

The pilot, Torger Totusek, 44, of La Palma, and the passenger, Jim Garber, 62, of Torrance, appeared calm as they surveyed the wreckage of the Cessna 182. No one on the ground was hurt.

“It’s surprising I’m not shaking much,” Totusek said.

The two men, engineers for Hughes Aircraft Co. in El Segundo and both pilots, took off about 10:20 a.m. for a brunch in Santa Barbara. At about 500 feet, Totusek said, the engine died, came back on briefly and quit a second time.

“I was praying that it would come back on line one more time,” he said, but it didn’t.

He turned the plane back toward the airport and tried to glide in. The plane just missed some high-voltage power lines, veered, knocked down a chain-link fence and cartwheeled to a stop on its nose.

Two Southern California Edison workers on the power lines and a crew on the ground were amazed that the plane missed them.

“We heard the engine cut off, and the plane made a sharp left U-turn,” said Randy Adams, part of the Edison crew on the ground. “It cleared our high-voltage line by no more than 30 feet.”

Had the plane hit the wires, “it would have been a major catastrophe,” Adams said. The workers as well as Totusek and Garber would have been injured or killed, he said, and power would have been cut off in a wide area.

The airport was shut down until noon while officials from the National Transportation Safety Board inspected and photographed the aircraft, which belongs to a friend of Totusek’s. The NTSB will investigate what caused the crash, safety inspector Paul Foster said.

The crash raised worries from nearby residents, many of whom lined the fences off Artesia and Pritchard avenues to observe the crash site.

“This airport is in a residential area, and I think the people who fly these airplanes need to be more cautious because they’re putting their lives and other people’s lives in danger,” said Kelli Prince, 20, who lives near the airport. “Thank God no one got hurt this time.”

Angry reaction from neighbors was expected, said Eddie Cogan, 76, of La Mirada, a pilot who was having breakfast at the airport coffee shop when he heard the crash.

“I’m happy that everybody walked away OK, but it’s very sad that we had to have a crash because it gets everybody talking, ‘those damn airplanes’ and stuff like that,” he said as he looked over the scene.