Pilot in Catalina crash that killed five took off after dark: like flying into a ‘black hole’

LOS ANGELES – On Tuesday night, the pilot of a small plane sat on the runway of Catalina Island’s “airport in the sky” with four passengers on board and a decision to make. Take off into the looming darkness, relying primarily on the plane’s instruments, or play it safe and wait until the morning?

The pilot shoved the throttles forward and went for it. Tracking data show the plane, owned by 73-year-old pilot Ali Safai, climbed to 75 feet above the runway, veered right and then nosed into a sudden, terrifyingly steep dive.

Seconds after the 8:08 p.m. takeoff, the Beechcraft Baron slammed into the hillside, killing everyone on board. All that’s left is a clump of white painted metal clinging to the mountainside among the cacti and sandy brown soil.

It will probably take investigators from the National Transportation Safety board months, if not years, to determine the precise cause of the crash. Even then, it may only be an educated guess.

Flying a small plane into Catalina Island’s “airport in the sky” can be a bit like landing on an aircraft carrier. It has one narrow runway perched high on a mesa with steep cliffs at either end tumbling 1,600 feet to the deep blue Pacific Ocean.

On a calm day with clear skies, flying to the remote airstrip is a thrill, an easily accessible adventure and a celebrated rite of passage in Southern California’s tight-knit private pilot community. But the tiny airport closes after sunset because it’s not equipped for night operations: there’s no air traffic controller, no evening attendants and, crucially, no runway lights.

Twenty-two miles offshore on a mostly undeveloped island, the night can be pitch black. It’s not just tough to see the runway, it can be hard to tell up from down.

It’s possible Safai’s plane experienced a catastrophic mechanical failure. Or the pilot might have suffered a sudden medical emergency – at the worst imaginable time. Or, according to several veteran pilots with experience flying to Catalina, the pilot could have momentarily lost spatial awareness when the plane leaped up into that darkness and all of the usual visual references disappeared.

“There’s no lights at the airport, and there’s virtually no lights on the island as a whole,” said Juan Browne, a veteran Air Force and commercial airline pilot who examined the tracking data. “It’s a big old black hole.”

It’s not clear who was flying, but if the pilot at the controls was instrument-rated, as Safai was, they would have been qualified to fly just by looking at the dials inside the cockpit.

Those would have indicated the position of the plane compared to the horizon, the angle of bank and whether the plane was climbing or descending.

But, at most airports, a pilot flying by those gauges is aided by the lights outside on the ground – they provide an intuitive sense of which way is down. In that respect, the extreme dark on Catalina is unusual, Browne said.

That’s one of the reasons the airport officially closes at 5 p.m., said the general manager, Carl True. But it’s also standard practice to grant pilots permission to land later than that as long as it’s still light out, he said.

On Tuesday, Safai had permission to land at 6:20 p.m. on the condition that he and his passengers leave before sunset, True said. “They did not comply.”

It’s not clear why the group stuck around for more than an hour and a half, long past sunset. But at least as big a mystery, in True’s mind, is why they decided to take off heading west over the darkest side of the island and the black ocean. That’s the standard direction in the daytime, so it might simply have been habit.

But the wind was calm, and there presumably was no other air traffic Tuesday night, so they could have turned around and taken off the other way, to the east. In that case, all of the lights of Los Angeles would have been spread out on the horizon in front of them – like a glowing carpet leading the way.

“I don’t know why they didn’t go that way,” True said.

True, who is a pilot and lives on Catalina, was among the first at the scene after the crash. There are still a lot of data and debris for the authorities to sort through before an answer is found, but True ranked disorientation as “a highly probable cause.”

Along with Safai, the other passengers were Haris Ali, 33, of Fullerton, California; Margaret Mary Fenner, 55; and Gonzalo Lubel, 34. The name of another man, in his 30s, has not been released pending notification of his family, according to the Los Angeles County coroner’s office.

Their deaths are even more devastating because the flight began as a rescue mission.

Three of the passengers were associated with Proteus Aero, a flight school based at the Santa Monica airport. Two were flight instructors, True believed, and the other a student pilot.

They had flown to Catalina in a Piper Arrow – part lesson, part excursion, True assumed – but had discovered a mechanical issue with their plane during their preflight check before heading back to the mainland.

Safai owned a flight school at Santa Monica airport until he retired from commercial flying about five years ago. He still had a plane hangared there and was friends with people at Proteus. He offered to make the quick trip to Catalina in his twin-engine, six-seat Beechcraft Baron to ferry the stranded aviators home.

“Despite stepping away from the industry, (Safai) remained a beloved and active member of our Santa Monica aviation community,” read a statement shared on social media by Proteus shortly after the crash. They called him “a cherished friend.”

The sudden death of so many friends and colleagues in such a familiar and beloved place has badly shaken Southern California pilots.

Piloting a private plane is obviously an expensive pastime, so it may be natural for the words “flying community” to conjure images of private jets and caviar.

But most flight schools in the U.S. are small businesses run on slim margins by enthusiastic pilots trying to turn their passion into a paycheck. Almost nobody learns to fly in a jet.

A typical training plane is a decades-old Cessna or Piper with all of the comfort and structural complexity of a 1970s VW bug. They’re small. They’re cramped. They often have chipped paint and stained upholstery.

In many, you’d be hard pressed to find a place to put a cup of coffee, and, even if you did, you’d be wise to drink it slowly because there is no toilet.

Some students are well-to-do retirees looking for a hobby, but the typical aspiring pilot is someone in their 20s. They often work several jobs to survive years of expensive training and low-paid apprenticeships with the hope of one day landing a six-figure job as an airline pilot.

Pete Engler, an instructor with the Long Beach Flying Club, has made the 20-minute hop across the channel to Catalina more than 400 times, he said. It’s an easy and exciting way to give students a quick break from the books and the repetition of flying in circles around the airport learning to take off, land and make proper radio calls.

It can even spark romance. Engler, 75, got his pilot’s license while he was in high school. He used it to ask the prettiest girl he knew on a date – a flight to Catalina. She was out of his league, he said, but, “the other guys were inviting her to Der Wienerschnitzel, so I liked my odds.” It worked. They’ve been married for decades and have five daughters.

On Wednesday afternoon, flying a reporter from Long Beach to the island to see the airstrip and survey the wreckage, Engler ran through all of the known details of the crash.

The Beechcraft had two engines, so if one of them stopped working immediately after takeoff (a pilot’s worst nightmare), there still should have been enough power from the other engine to circle back and land safely, Engler said.

And if the pilot had had a heart attack, the person sitting in the co-pilot’s seat probably also knew how to fly, Engler said. They might even have been a flight instructor with the knowledge and ability to grab the controls and keep the plane in the air.

On departure from Catalina on Wednesday, Engler took off to the west, just as Safai’s plane had. In less than 30 seconds, the wreckage of the Beechcraft appeared beneath the right wing. It looked tiny from a couple hundred feet above.

Engler fell silent as he banked gently so his passenger could get a clear view. Both were struck by how close the wreckage was to the end of the runway.

“Whatever happened, it was quick,” Engler said.