By Ann K. Williams
Lookout Staff

September 7, 2011 -- The City of Santa Monica is acting to allay fears of residents following a plane crash in the yard of a Sunset Park home last week.

The Cessna 172 was flown by a student pilot on a solo cross-country flight who looped back towards Santa Monica Airport (SMO) to try to make a landing. Residents have expressed concern about the operations of flight schools at SMO and about the potential for accidents caused by inexperienced pilots.

“Staff and the community are grateful that the pilot sustained only moderate injuries as a result of the accident,” said Public Works Director Martin Pastucha in a memo to the Mayor and City Council dated September 2.

“This terrible near-tragic plane crash has generated many inquiries about increased regulation at flight schools at SMO,” Pastucha said.

Since the flight schools “constitute a significant amount of aircraft operations at SMO,” Pastucha said the city plans to review their practices, while looking into other ways get a handle on their impact on the community surrounding the airport.

Staff will travel to Washington to meet with Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officials to go over the lease agreed to by the city and the FAA in 1984 which mandates flight schools at SMO.

They'll also review existing flight school leases to see if there's any wiggle-room in their provisions that may give the city some power in relation to the schools' operations.

And staff will meet directly with flight school operators to work on ways to protect the community.

While the city “takes very seriously the implications of the recent near-tragic crash,” Pastucha said that last week's incident was “the first known accident involving a student pilot directly associated with one of the airport's flight schools.”

A list generated by Friends of Sunset Park – a neighborhood organization known for speaking out on airport safety – seems to indicate otherwise.

It enumerates 84 “Plane Crashes Connected With Santa Monica Airport” since 1970, 21 of which are designated “instructional.” In some cases, the crash amounted to out-of-control skids that caused severe damage to the planes, and in some, the flight instructor was at the helm. In some cases, it wasn't clear from the list who was flying the plane.

Some incidents on the list involved planes that neither took off nor landed at SMO.

Since 2001, FOSP lists 20 crashes of aircraft in some way connected with SMO. Eleven of those were fatal.

FOSP lists four of the flights in the past 10 years as “instructional.” Six of the incidents since 2001 involved planes owned by Justice Aviation, the flight school that rented the Cessna 172 that crashed last week.

In the past 20 years, two flights by student pilots on the FOSP list – including last week's – crashed in a local residential district.

Residents' concerns led the council to pass an ordinance banning jets from SMO in 2008, but it was overturned when the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in the FAA's favor last January.

The FAA lease agreement with the city for the airport will expire in 2015. The city is conducting a study of the site and its possible uses and will host a series of community meetings between this fall and next April, prior to City Council deliberation on the future of the airport site.

The National Transportation Safety Bureau is investigating the cause of last week's crash and is expected to issue a preliminary report next week.