Corona's airport safety panel holds first meeting

By PAIGE AUSTIN
The Press-Enterprise
CORONA - The mayor's Airport Safety Taskforce held its first meeting Tuesday to assess the Corona Municipal Airport's safety after January's midair crash that killed five people.
As the nine-member panel of pilots, city and business leaders met for the first time, it faced public fears fueled by a string of small plane crashes in the region. Thirteen people have died in six Inland plane crashes so far this year.
Many questions are being asked in the aftermath of the Jan. 20 wreck, acknowledged Mayor Jeff Miller at the start of Tuesday's meeting.
"We will have a report from this panel to the City Council to evaluate and decide what the next step is," said Miller as he introduced the taskforce to an audience of two dozen people, most from the aviation community.
"We do live in the flight path and we want to make sure that we live in a safe area," said taskforce Chairman Richard O. Haley.
The group will meet twice a month and release findings in June.
On March 18, the group will hear a presentation on the airport from the Federal Aviation Administration, Haley said. In a sign of the panel's concerns, the members concentrated their questions Tuesday on the airport's flight pattern and the current measures in place to make sure that all pilots follow it.
Tuesday's meeting mainly offered a factual introduction to the airport's history and operations.
The airport is home to 420 aircraft, and it sees about 158,000 takeoffs and landings each year, said Mark Wills, the city's administrative and community services manager.
There have been 53 plane crashes in Corona over the past 20 years, Wills said. Ten were fatal, killing 23 people.
The National Transportation Safety Board is still investigating the Jan. 20 midair wreck. In a preliminary report, investigators cited evidence that neither pilot took evasive action and that one plane could have been entering the landing pattern for Corona Municipal Airport while the other was already in it.
Last week, three people died when a Corona-based plane crashed after takeoff from Riverside's airport, and on Jan. 10, a pilot who took off from Corona died when he struck a hillside near Canyon Lake.
Reach Paige Austin at 951-893-2106 or paustin@PE.com