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Mar 17 2010
Two veteran pilots -- one a Bakersfield-based national champion in 2004 at a Reno air show -- were killed Wednesday in a World War II vintage airplane they've flown countless times before, according to friends at the crash scene in a canal and open farm field behind the Frito Lay plant.

Al Goss, 68, the owner of the blue North American AT-6 (Advanced Training) "Texan" that was based in Shafter's Minter Field, and Steven Ballard, 54, a FedEx pilot from Anchorage, Alaska who worked on Goss's "Warlock team" at Minter Field, died at 11:34 a.m. when the AT-6 broke into several pieces, reported friends and the Kern County coroner's staff.

One friend, 54-year-old Allan Walker, who is also a member of the Warlock team, said he was "crushed" and "absolutely devastated" by the death of his friends. Both he and fellow team member Troy Tenhet, 65, of Bakersfield, said the crash made no sense unless something mechanical broke.

"They were experts," Tenhet said.

He called the weather "severe clear -- the kind of weather we like."

But witnesses said the plane was flying fast and fairly low when it dipped, came back up and then crashed in an explosion.

"It was shocking," said witness Donnis Topel, 61, who was born in Bakersfield but was on Interstate 5 on her way back to her home in Mendocino County when she stared at the "beautiful blue" plane just before it crashed.

She said it crossed I-5 going west and then turned around to cross the freeway back east. "I just didn't think it was a crop duster, but it went really low to the ground," she said.

"Then it lifted up and it looked like it went up too fast and too quickly," she said. "It looked like it was trying to go to the left to go north and then it just slipped backwards and went into the ground. I saw two balls of fire, smoke and dust."

Topel said she watched the plane as she was also trying to watch traffic on the freeway.

Another witness, Emanuel Puga, 23, told KERO-TV Channel 23 that the plane went low, back up, then down and up again just before it crashed, "Once it hit the ground, it exploded," said Puga who was working in a nearby field.

It was not immediately clear who was flying the plane, but it has controls such that if one pilot becomes incapacitated, the other one can take over, Tenhet said.

The back part of the plane was at rest in a canal, the engine and propeller was about 30 yards to the east in a plowed dirt field, and other broken parts were scattered over about 50 yards in the field south of Highway 58 and east of I-5.

Goss, a cropduster pilot who was at work on Tuesday but had Wednesday off, bought the plane in 1978 and worked on it constantly "to keep it in tip-top shape," Walker said.

The engine was just put on last year, Tenhet said. "Nothing on the plane was old except the frame," Tenhet said.

He and Walker called Goss "world famous" for his racing abilities, best exhibited at the now 47-year-old National Championship Air Races and Air Show in Reno. He won the event in his class in 1982 and again in 2004 when he set a record for the fastest time at 238.281 mph.

He did that in six laps around a 5-mile, oval course marked by large pole pylons, the show's website indicates.