Pilot in crash is called a hero

The lights from the plane were heading right at Steve Kiser, and there was no time to run.

“I was standing out there with my buddies, and I’m saying, ‘That just don’t look right, dude,’ ” said the 46-year-old Riverside trucker.

Kiser was drinking a beer on his front lawn, about to call it a night. Instead, he was caught, by his own account, like a deer in the headlights.

The plane was losing altitude. It abruptly swerved left, barely missing power lines and rooftops, before crashing into the street less than 25 feet away, killing the pilot and two passengers.

“As the plane crumbled into the ground, it was a fraction of a second, and then it was just whoof!” said Kiser who has lived near Riverside Municipal Airport for 18 years.

“It was so big coming at you, you just figure running wasn’t an option,” he said.

Kiser felt the blazing heat from the explosion, which sent two palm trees up in flames. Embers flew in all directions. A vehicle parked on the street was destroyed.

It was several moments before he realized how close he had come to death.

The single-engine four-seat plane crashed shortly after takeoff about 10 p.m. Wednesday in the 8700 block of Pembroke Avenue, less than half a mile from the airport.

Authorities said the pilot narrowly missed homes and people on the palm-tree-lined street.

“There were people that were outside very near the impact point. It is amazing and lucky that it didn’t hurt anybody on the ground,” said Patrick Jones, a National Transportation Safety Board investigator who was on the scene Thursday morning to begin a joint inquiry with the Federal Aviation Administration into the cause of the crash.

Riverside County officials late Thursday had not released the names of any of the crash victims.

Most of the plane was intact, and the victims’ bodies were badly burned, said Riverside Fire Department spokesman Mike Fisher.

At the time of the accident, the control tower at the airport, which handles a large volume of corporate jet traffic, was unmanned because it closes about 8 p.m.

The plane appeared to have landed in Riverside about 8:30 p.m. after taking off from Corona Municipal Airport. It was headed back to Corona when it crashed, Jones said.

As the plane took off, Kiser was outside his home talking to a friend of his son and had a clear view of the runway. He thought something was wrong immediately because he had never seen that runway used for takeoffs.

On Thursday, authorities said the runway in question, the smaller of the two at the airport, is rarely used by local pilots.

The aircraft that crashed, a Mooney M20C, is registered to Randall Emry of Mission Viejo. Emry’s wife answered the phone at the couple’s home Thursday and said her husband was not involved in the accident.

The woman, who declined to give her name, said that she did not know the pilot of the plane but that he was an associate of her husband and a certified pilot.

“It’s our plane, and we have partners that fly it from time to time,” she said. “We’ve always known the risk of going up. It’s a single-engine plane, so you always have those types of risks as opposed to getting on commercial jetliners.”

For his part, Kiser praised the pilot’s actions, noting that many of his neighbors were already in for the night and would have had no warning of danger.

“If he’d been just a second longer, he would’ve come right into my yard. He definitely did the heroic thing,” he said. “It’s sad that he died, but what he did, he probably saved a ton of people.”

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victoria.kim@latimes.com