Airplane Accidents

He was the best they had. Earlier in his career, the Marines had entrusted Lt. Col. Keith M. Sweaney with the president's life: He flew the Marine One helicopter. Now, at 42, he was leading the team charged with evaluating the V-22 Osprey, an experimental aircraft intended to replace Vietnam-era helicopters. Next, he was to command the first tactical Osprey squadron.

A single-engine airplane lost power and made an emergency landing Tuesday in the middle of a bustling business district, knocking over a utility pole and nearly colliding with traffic. The pilot, co-pilot and three passengers were not injured when the plane landed safely on a four-lane highway lined with fast-food restaurants, gas stations and motels. The 12-seat plane came to a rest in front of a Howard Johnson motel and a pizza restaurant.

The pilots of a charter jet from Los Angeles that crashed last year in Aspen, Colo., made "numerous" errors as they rushed to make an instrument landing at dusk in snowy weather, federal investigators concluded Tuesday. The National Transportation Safety Board's final report on the March 29 crash that killed 18 people also called for improved training of charter crews on the management of complex, rapidly evolving situations. Since the Sept.

It happens every time there's a crash near the Fullerton Municipal Airport, and this time's no exception. Residents, shaken to the core by the specter of sudden and untimely death, complain bitterly about the facility's safety and call for its alteration or demise. "We're going to petition the City Council," said Richard Fowler just hours after a small airplane nose-dived into a home 60 yards from his, killing the pilot and engulfing the house in flames.

The three small planes were flying in tight formation Sunday, with veteran lead pilot Arpad Bottlo heading up a narrow canyon, when a pilot behind them realized they were in trouble. "Can you make it out?" the trailing pilot radioed Bottlo. "I don't think so," Bottlo replied. Seconds later, Bottlo's plane crashed into the steep wall at the end of the canyon, killing him and his two passengers, Jesus Lizarraga and Robert Maddux.

The airliner plummeted in a supersonic spiral, hurtling full power toward a river, carrying 104 people to their deaths. Crash investigators were startled to discover that the plane's "black boxes" had gone blank several minutes before the dive. One theory: Someone had pulled a circuit breaker in the cockpit and cut the power to them.

The "complete hydraulic failure" reported by the pilot of doomed United Airlines Flight 232 is one of the most feared events in flying, rendering even a sophisticated three-engine jet like the DC-10 virtually uncontrollable. The wide-bodied DC-10 has three independent hydraulic systems that operate all the plane's control surfaces on its wings and tail, its landing gear and its brakes.

Four of the five people killed in a Christmas Eve plane crash on Santa Catalina Island were identified Wednesday as a Rancho Palos Verdes man, a French national and two children visiting from France with their mother, who also was killed. She was identified earlier as Francine Gaume, 44.

After agreeing to pay families of the Pan Am flight that was destroyed in 1988 over Lockerbie, Scotland, Libya has also consented to increase compensation to families of victims in the blowing up of a French airliner a year later, diplomats said Thursday. France had threatened to oppose lifting international sanctions on Libya unless the North African nation increased payments to the relatives of the 171 people who died when a UTA airliner was destroyed over the Sahara Desert in 1989.

A light plane that had just taken off from Santa Monica Airport crashed nose-first Friday through the roof and two floors of an apartment building in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles, killing the pilot and another person and igniting a fire that forced at least two people to leap from the building. Neighbors, gardeners working nearby, a coach from nearby Fairfax High School and an Orthodox Jewish volunteer rescue team rushed to help as residents struggled to flee the flames.