Three Crash Victims Were From O.C.

Three Orange County residents--two veteran private pilots and a young man who was flying for the first time--were reported among the dead and missing Friday after a midair collision between two light planes near Long Beach Harbor, according to authorities and relatives.

The bodies of two Huntington Beach men, flight instructor John Michael Chisolm, 56, and general contractor Stephen Arlow, 42, were recovered by divers.

As the U.S. Coast Guard continued its difficult underwater search, relatives and authorities confirmed the identities of the two other men. Michael Wallace, 18, of La Habra and flight instructor Kevin Sok, 33, of Long Beach.

The divers suspended their search of the ocean floor at 6 p.m. Friday and will resume this morning, officials said.

The search is being supervised by the National Transportation Safety Board and involves the Navy, Coast Guard, the Long Beach and Los Angeles fire departments and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

The NTSB’s findings on the crash are not expected for months. The Coast Guard said small pieces of wreckage from the Cessna 172 and Cessna 152 were being retrieved from a mile-square search area on the ocean floor just south of the Long Beach entrance to the Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors.

Both Chisolm and Arlow were in the same plane at the time of the accident. Although Arlow had almost 20 years of flight experience, he was training to be a certified flight instructor and was taking lessons from Chisolm.

Chisolm, a tall, lean and soft-spoken native of Virginia, was known as “John By-the-Book Chisolm,” a meticulous fire inspector who was as obsessive about inspecting armament caches at the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station as he was about making lengthy preflight checks of his aircraft.

Indeed, it was difficult for many of his former colleagues at the weapons station to believe his plane could ever collide with another aircraft.

“He was an affable guy, but he carried out tasks with a pensive attention to detail,” said Larry Bach, the base’s fire chief. “He was very serious about his piloting. I just can’t understand the nature of this accident.”

It was with some irony that another friend recalled Chisolm saying he felt furthest from danger’s reach when he was flying. “He felt safest when he was flying, because there was so little congestion,” said David Witt, battalion fire chief at the base.

Witt said Chisolm had often flown in inclement weather, using navigational instruments to guide his plane through dense fog and storms. “He always said it was more difficult to fly on a clear day than on an overcast day, because you can see the silhouette of other planes on an overcast day,” Witt said.

*

When he was on the ground, friends and family members said, Chisolm’s devotions were to his daughter, Kerri, who lived with him, and to his religion.

Family members said Chisolm could be an intensely private man who kept his family life and business life separate.

“He was always a private person, and things in his life tended to be somewhat segmented,” his younger sister, Virginia Thompson, said. “He had a sense of humor, but he was always pretty serious about things.”

*

At Arlow’s home in Huntington Beach, his brother-in-law Paul Engstrom described the contractor as a devout Christian who once operated a personal ministry for Laotians and Hmong immigrants.

“He was just one of these people that you meet who is totally without guile,” Engstrom said. “If he owned only four shirts, he would have given away two to people who needed them, because he wouldn’t need more than two. We’re obviously very sad.”

Arlow was married but had no children.

Engstrom said relatives were officially notified Friday of Arlow’s death but had feared the worst on Thursday.

“When you hear about an accident like that, you just hope it’s someone you’ve never known,” Engstrom said. “His mother and his wife became really concerned when he failed to come home.”

*

Wallace was seated in the second plane. A college student who graduated last year from La Serena High School, Wallace had never before flown in an airplane, according to official sources.

Family members declined to comment Friday, although neighbors said they were shaken by the news.

“We’ve known him since he was in elementary school. He’s a good kid. This is a shock,” said Elizabeth Wilson, a neighbor for the last 10 years.

Flying with Wallace was Sok, a flight instructor. Sok lived in Long Beach with his family and was a native of Cambodia who developed an immediate love of flying.

“We all told him we thought it was dangerous, but he always said that’s what he wanted to do. That’s the life he liked,” his brother Ricky Sok said. “Even as a little kid he loved the idea of flying. He would build little airplanes for toys.”

Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Dan Pippenger, operations officer for the search, said at a news briefing Friday evening that one of the airplanes was banking when it hit the other broadside. The pilot of the plane that was hit may have had vision problems because his craft was oriented toward the sun.

Citing witness accounts, Pippenger said one plane broke apart and the other hit the water intact.

Neither plane was believed to be under the guidance of air traffic controllers. So it was the responsibility of the pilots, under Federal Aviation Administration rules, to “see and avoid” other aircraft.

*

Times staff writers Stuart Pfeifer, Dan Weikel and Eric Malnic and Librarian Sheila Kern contributed to this report.