Coroner extracted victims in nearby field Wednesday
afternoon
Gilroy – Three Japanese nationals were killed after a two-engine plane crashed Monday afternoon into the South County Regional Wastewater Authority plant in Gilroy.
Killed were flight students Yoshiyuki Kato, 27, and Yasushi Miyata, 38, and their instructor, Shoki Haraguchi, 26. A coroner worked Wednesday afternoon to recover the bodies, almost 48 hours after crashing, from the vintage 1964 Beechcraft Travel Air that was submerged in more than 15 feet of raw sewage.
The bodies were trapped in the fuselage as rescue crews couldn’t remove them until Wednesday afternoon: The slippery, foul floor of the drained tank made it impossible for coroners and investigators to dissect the crash on-site.
“We’re working with raw sewage,” said Kristi Dunks, an air safety investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board. “There’s a lot of biohazards we have to be concerned with.”
A Sacramento-based salvage company lifted the entire plane from the tank Wednesday morning, using a Sikorsky helicopter. The remains were moved to a nearby field, where a coroner worked Wednesday afternoon to extract the victims. The crumpled plane will be transported to a secure storage facility in Sacramento, where investigators will study it for clues to the crash.
The flight school where the flight originated from – Nice Air of San Jose – said Kato and Miyata were training to pilot multi-engine aircraft such as the Travel Air. Haraguchi 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. Each day “when I got here at 9am, 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. Santa Clara County 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 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.”
Wednesday, the plant continued to operate as usual. The sewage had been diverted from the tank into other channels. Little fuel had spilled from the battered plane, said Vaziry, and after the plane is removed, the wastewater tank will be inspected, then re-filled with sewage, as usual. Workers hosed the tank clean Tuesday, clearing inspectors’ views of the wreck.
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, said NTSB public affairs officer Keith Holloway, and is 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.
A Japanese passport and a flight log were found near the scene Monday. Tuesday, a green shoulder bag, dredged from the waters, sat on the walkway next to the emptied tank. Television reporters from networks from San Francisco to Japan skirted past a sullied yellow notebook of a Japanese brand, labeled ‘Flight Note.’
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.
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.
“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.”
Within five business days, NTSB officials expect to release a preliminary report online, detailing the facts of the crash. But the accident’s cause could take far longer: a full investigation may take six months to a year.
The incident has drawn global media attention to Gilroy, with Japanese news anchors jostling for footage next to Univision reporters, San Francisco photographers and cameramen from Salinas.
Fatal air accidents are rare, especially in instructional settings: in 2005, only 16 such accidents occurred. But even among air accidents, Monday’s event was a strange one. Surveying the putrid tank, one NTSB official remarked, “It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Emily Alpert covers public safety issues for The Dispatch. She can be reached at 847-7158 or at ea*****@************ch.com.
