Girl Scout Driver Was Unaware of Gear Feature

The driver of the runaway charter bus that crashed near the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway last July was not told that the bus would upshift automatically as it gained speed on a downgrade, the man who taught him bus driving techniques said Friday.

Driving instructor Brett Pryor said he did not tell 23-year-old Richard Gonzales about the lower-gear upshift feature of the automatic transmission because he himself was unaware of it.

Pryor was one of the final witnesses on the last day of testimony before a National Transportation Safety Board hearing here on the July 31 charter bus crash that killed four teen-age Girl Scouts and three adults, including Gonzales.

The California Highway Patrol says brake failure and Gonzales’ failure to use a low enough gear apparently were major factors in the crash.

CHP officers say evidence indicates that the four-speed automatic transmission was in third gear--too high a gear to provide adequate engine-compression braking--as the bus began to gather speed on the 9% downgrade, eventually reaching 64 m.p.h.

Spokesmen for the transmission’s manufacturer have testified that even if Gonzales had shifted to a low gear as the bus sped up, a mechanism designed to keep the engine from over-revving would have automatically shifted back up into third and then fourth gear. It was this mechanism that the driving instructor said he was unaware of.

Pryor said he gave Gonzales--a fellow employee of Mayflower Contract Services--about an hour of behind-the-wheel instruction last April on how to handle a bus on downhill mountain grades. He said Gonzales’ performance was “real good” during the training and there were “no problems” of any kind.

A pre-trip checklist filled out a few hours before the crash by Gonzales and his sister, Jeanette Cano, another Mayflower employee, indicated that the bus was in good condition, despite the maladjusted front brakes found after the accident.

The NTSB did not call Cano as a witness and did not ask other witnesses why she filled out part of the form and signed it as the “first driver,” even though she did not drive the bus on the day of the accident.

CHP Officer Jimmy Cleveland said during an interview that a lack of proper brake adjustment might have been difficult to spot during such an inspection.