The wreckage of the Beech 19A aircraft that crashed near Kunia on July 28, killing all four Oahu residents on board, likely will stay in the state-owned Honouliuli Forest Reserve where it went down.

National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Keith Holloway said the decision to recover the wrecked plane falls to its owner, Jahn Mueller.

Mueller, owner of Aircraft Maintenance & Flight School Hawaii, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser last month that he is not required to remove the wreckage from the mountain and has no plans to do so. The state Department of Land and Natural Resources, which has jurisdiction of the reserve, said it has determined that the wreckage is not an environmental hazard and does not plan to retrieve it.

The bodies of the plane’s pilot, 29-year-old Dean Hutton, and his passengers — Heather Riley, 27, Alexis Aaron, 32, and Gerrit Evensen, 28 — were recovered July 29. Honolulu Fire Department workers rappelled from a helicopter to the heavily forested crash site near the Palikea and Pohakea Pass trails to retrieve the bodies.

If the wreckage is recovered, then NTSB would send an investigator to examine it, Holloway said. “At the moment, NTSB does have enough data gathered to move forward with an investigation,” he said.

But critics are questioning the decision to leave the wrecked Beech, considering that another of Mueller’s planes, a Piper PA 28-140, crash-landed in a Mapunapuna stream under a Moanalua Freeway bridge June 30, seriously injuring the three people on board.

“I believe the wreckage should be retrieved for the sake of my friends’ lives,” said Devlyn Perugini, who was friends with the Beech passengers. “It should be a priority to explore every possibility. I’m not trying to be spiteful or attack anyone, but there are too many things left unanswered.”

‘A lot of loose ends’

Charles W. “Bill” Arnold, general manager of San Diego-based Arnold & Arnold Offices who has investigated more than 10,000 airline accidents, said it is uncommon to leave wreckage, but that it happens, especially when there is no insurance and no economic reason for an owner to retrieve the hull or engine. In those cases, NTSB generally doesn’t pay to retrieve the wreckage unless they are pressured by lawmakers, Arnold said.

“The NTSB probably has a good idea of what they think happened based on whatever information that they’ve got,” he said. “You can do a pretty darn good investigation without the wreckage. However, if it were a mechanical issue, they would need the engine or the hull.”

But Robert Katz, a Dallas- based flight instructor and 36-year pilot who tracks nationwide plane crashes, said unusual factors in the fatal Beech crash warrant wreckage recovery and a full investigation.

“Not making Mr. Mueller recover this plane is like allowing the fox to guard the henhouse,” Katz said. “Two crashes in such a short time is a red flag. There are a lot of loose ends here. Not enough scrutiny.”

State Department of Transportation spokesman Tim Sakahara said Mueller’s permit was for hangar storage of a personal plane, not commercial operations. Mueller had applied for a permit to keep his two planes, which have since crashed, parked outside his hangar. His application was still pending at the time of the crashes because Mueller was not timely in submitting a certificate of commercial general liability insurance, Sakahara said.

“The state is reviewing Mueller’s airport activities,” he said.

Mueller said that “paperwork issues” had nothing to do with the crashes. He does his own inspection authorization work and expects no-fault findings.

Mueller, who recovered the Piper, said the engine was burned so investigation will take longer to “clear” him.

And he interprets NTSB’s preliminary report that said the Beech collided with terrain as pilot error, thus making recovery moot.

“An airplane climbing with four people flew into the mountain and it was over gross weight. He (pilot Dean Hutton) never should have gone into the valley,” Mueller said. “It’s not my fault. The accident had nothing to do with maintenance.”

Pilot error often cited

Barry Schiff, a retired pilot who has logged 28,000 flight hours in more than 355 types of aircraft, estimates that 80 percent of fatal light-plane accidents are due to pilot error. “The (Beech 19A) was not a good-performing airplane. Four big people and a full load of fuel would have trouble climbing,” he said.

Schiff said controlled flight into terrain in which the pilot misjudges distance also is a common cause of downed sightseeing flights.

But Katz, Hutton’s uncle Scott Potwin and Honolulu attorney Rick Fried, who represents a passenger in the downed Piper, have raised mechanical concerns. On the day the bodies were recovered, Potwin told the Star-Advertiser that Hutton had experienced prior mechanical problems in the Beech. Fried has said his clients had rejected that same Beech for mechanical reasons before renting the Piper, which “experienced engine failure in the sky.”

Previous investigations

Holloway, the NTSB official, said a typical investigation into the cause of a crash can take 12 to 18 months. The NTSB will review radar data, air traffic control communications, medical and flying history, and the maintenance records of the aircraft, among other things, he said.

Mueller said decades of experience back his mechanical prowess. The 56-year-old Mueller said he was just 15 when he started working for his father, the late Hans Mueller, who owned Hawaiian Air Tour Service. By 27, he was a Hawaiian Airlines maintenance supervisor. In 1992, he opened his aircraft maintenance and engine overhaul shop.

Both accidents have impacted Mueller’s business, which has stopped renting airplanes and operating a flight school. Still, Mueller said, his business has survived other investigations.

According to NTSB records, another of Mueller’s planes was involved in a fatal accident June 15, 2001. That crash killed Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Matthew Monczynski, 23, and injured his then-22-year-old instructor Matt McGurk. That Piper Cherokee was recovered and the NTSB traveled to Lanai to investigate, later finding McGurk at fault. Mueller said McGurk was an independent contractor and that no mechanical problems were found.

“It wasn’t my fault and we are still here. I’m the most senior guy on this ramp,” he said. “We aren’t going anywhere. “