A pilot’s door did not appear fully closed before taking off from Fullerton Airport earlier this month and opened shortly after liftoff — prompting a call for an emergency landing minutes before the plane crashed into a warehouse, according to a preliminary report released by the National Transportation Safety Board.
The collision killed a father and his teenage daughter and injured 19 workers inside.
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The crash killed Pascal Reid and his 16-year-old daughter, Kelly, who lived in Huntington Beach.
A witness who knew Pascal Reid said he saw Reid taxi the plane from his hangar in the southeast corner of the airport toward the runway. Security video found by investigators shows the pilot’s cabin door was down, but “it was not flush with the fuselage,” the report said.
Shortly after takeoff, Reid radioed that an emergency landing was required and the tower controller asked if he could make a left turn. Reid radioed that he would circle around and land on Runway 24.
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ExpandThe plane had reached about 500 feet.
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“The airplane then rolled right as its nose dropped, and dove towards the warehouse where it collided in a fireball,” about 1,500 feet short of the runway, the report said.
A piece of the plane, described as panel-like, “floated” or “fluttered” to the ground, the report said.
Inside the building, which housed a Michael Nicholas Designs upholstery factory, the plane struck a series of warehouse pallet rack frames loaded with foam and wood furniture material. The fuselage was found on a pallet rack about 6 feet above ground with the forward cabin and most of the wings burned. The engine, firewall and instrument panel assembly were found about 40 feet away.
The only piece of the plane not found inside the warehouse was the left, main-cabin door, which was on the building’s roof about 150 feet away from the impact point, investigators said.
Investigators learned the airplane kit was shipped to Reid in 2007 or 2008 and that he finished building it in 2011. The kit came with a door-locking system that used aluminum latch pins.
“To lock the door, the handle is rotated forward, which extends the latch pins into the pin blocks,” the NTSB report says. “The handle contains a release lever that locks the pins in place when they have reached the fully extended position. Once locked, the door handle cannot be moved to the open position until a button at the end of the release lever has been pressed. …
“The door handle was found just short of the forward closed and locked position,” the report said. “And because it was not fully forward, its locking button had not engaged.”
In 2010, Van’s began including a secondary door latch on its RV-10 kits, the report said. Records from Vans Aircraft showed a retrofit kit was sent to the pilot on Jan. 25, 2010, but investigators noted in the report that the secondary door latch was not installed on Reid’s plane.
In addition, the plane came with a door-latch indicator system, with four magnetic reed switches mounted within each door pillar configured to LED warning lamps on the instrument panel that would tell the pilot the pins were in the fully extended and locked position. However, investigators noted that only two of those reed switches, on the tail side of each door, had been installed on Reid’s plane.
“As such, the modified system would not have warned the pilot if the forward latch pins had failed to fully engage,” the report said.
Kelly Reid was a junior at Huntington Beach High School who played soccer, flag football and lacrosse. She was remembered as a positive teammate and a gifted player and her soccer coach, Raul Ruiz, said she had a positive outlook on life and was fully of energy.
“Her father was at every single game, always so proud of his daughter,” the Huntington Beach High girls soccer team posted on Instagram.
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