Authorities Thursday identified a student pilot who was killed when two planes collided on a runway at Compton/Woodley Airport.
The crash occurred about 7 p.m. March 13 on Runway 25L on March 13, when a North American T28 airplane crashed into a Cessna 152 airplane occupied by a flight instructor and a student pilot.
The fatally injured man was identified today by the coroner's office as 40-year-old Lukas Michael Swidinski of Long Beach.
"The Cessna landed first, trailed by the T28," Ian Gregor of the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement. "The T28 landed and ran into the Cessna, which was still on the runway, causing the Cessna to explode. There were two people on the Cessna and one on the T28."
The second man in the Cessna was a flight instructor in his 30s. He was taken to a hospital in critical condition, the sheriff's department said.
The pilot of the T28 was unhurt, according to the sheriff's department.
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Personnel from the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board were working to determine what caused the two planes to collide.
The T28 is a military trainer first used by the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy in the 1950s, then was utilized as a counter-insurgency aircraft in the Vietnam War.
Anyone who may have witnessed the crash was asked to call the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's Aero Bureau at (562) 421-2701.
