Vicki Cruse, a petite world-class stunt pilot based at the Santa Paula Airport who rose to lofty heights as a national aerobatics champion, died Saturday in an accident during the World Aerobatics Championships in Great Britain. She was 40.
News of her death shook up the small but tight-knit aviation community in Santa Paula.
"It's a huge, huge shock to all of us," said Marikay Lindstrom, a friend of Cruse and fellow pilot. "You can't imagine this would happen to Vicki. She was so attuned to what she was doing in aerobatics."
Cruse was small - maybe 5 feet tall and 100 pounds, similar in build to a horse jockey - but she thought and achieved big, Lindstrom said.
"She was a pillar, an icon, this little girl in this superfast airplane," Lindstrom said. "She was a role model for aspiring female pilots. ... Her dreams were as big as all outdoors and she accomplished them. Nothing stopped her."
Cruse, a Missouri native, was a member of the Ventura County 99s, a local branch of the International Organization of Women Pilots. She was also president of the International Aerobatics Club. She was a former member of the U.S. national aerobatics team and won a national championship in 2007, in the unlimited division.
Pete Mason, a longtime pilot in Santa Paula who's done a variety of flying in his aviation career, said Cruse was into competitive aerobatics "in a big way."
"Her skill level was very high," Mason said. "I doubt she made a mistake."
Unable to bail out
In the United Kingdom, team manager Norm DeWitt said Cruse lost control of her aircraft during a qualifying flight at Britain's Silverstone motor racing circuit. DeWitt, in a statement, said Cruse - the plane's sole occupant - appeared to have suffered a mechanical problem in flight and was unable to bail out of the Edge 540 plane she was in because of the low altitude at which she was flying.
Mason said the Edge 540 plane Cruse used in the U.K. competition was not hers. Her own Edge 540 was set up to accommodate her petite size, he added.
"It was a borrowed plane," he said. "It looks like there were some complications with it."
Veteran pilots said Cruse had been based out of the Santa Paula Airport for about the last 10 years. She worked part time managing the parts room at CP Aviation, a flight school there, for the past two years, co-owner Clay Phelps said.
"She was one of those special types that you can't say enough good things about," he said.
His wife, Judy Phelps, was taking aerobatics lessons from Cruse in Santa Paula. Judy Phelps said Cruse critiqued and coached her for the past five years. "That turned out to be the start of a great friendship," Phelps said. "She was one of my best friends."
She and Lindstrom described Cruse as a quiet, kind of shy, independent and private person who opened up once you got to know her. You could count on her; if she said she'd do something, she did it. She also was articulate and very precise about things - her hair, her clothes, every detail.
Phelps recalled walking into her hangar in Santa Paula recently. "The walls were covered with all the trophies she won, all of them hung meticulously, straight and orderly," she said.
Cruse recently had taken up ballroom dancing lessons at an Arthur Murray studio in Thousand Oaks and won a contest, Phelps said. "Watching her dance was like watching her fly," she said. "She made it look easy and effortless."
Mason noted that his 15-year-old son, Sammy, cuts the grass on the airport grounds. "Whenever she taxied out, he'd wave at her to do something," the elder Mason recalled. "She'd take off and give a little wing wag to him. He always appreciated that."
'Lot of ways to die'
Cruse had no family locally, Lindstrom and Phelps said. They knew of an aunt and a brother in Missouri. Lindstrom believes Cruse had a boyfriend, a fellow racing pilot based somewhere in Northern California.
Phelps said Cruse never talked to her about the risks aerobatic flying entails. "There's risk in everything we do," she said. "Every time we get in a car, we take a risk."
Lindstrom agreed. "When you are a pilot like we are," she said, "you know that there is risk. You don't talk about it. It's just inherent."
One place Cruse talked about the risks is on a You Tube site with a video that shows off her flying prowess. In it, a voice intones that Cruse came to the realization that "once a pilot is in the air, there's a whole lot of ways to die." In the next sequence, Cruse ticks off the list: "Engine failure, prop failure, a bird strike, a mid-air collision, control failure, running out of gas ..."
The news hit hard, there too. One who commented at the site wrote, "I was at Silverstone today and the sudden silence was quite surreal; thoughts with her family and friends." Another pointed out how unfortunate and prophetic the video's tone was. Wrote another, "Farewell Vicki, on eagles' wings you will soar."
- The Associated Press contributed to this story.
On the Net
For the You Tube video on Cruse, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaiajLjRTHs
