Laguna Beach PT-19 Follow-Up

Intro

Back in January 2022, Tyler had identified a possible wreck and I went out on the Sundiver to investigate.

Sure enough, we got a small but repeatable sonar return and I dove it and took a bunch of photos. We ended up classifying it as a PT-19 and then identified the specific plane as N50013 that was ditched by Stephen Mayian in April 1964.

Fast forward to October 2024 and we got an email from a reader who is the granddaughter of Stephen Mayian!

We emailed a few times and she made some corrections based on her grandfather’s tale of the accident — but then she also indicated that he was still alive at 88 years old and living in Arizona!

Interview Call

I gave Stephen a call and had a great conversation. He is sharp as a tack and was able to fill in some blanks and correct some of my assumptions about the accident. He also had some very funny tales about the whole thing. Below is a recap of our conversation.

The Purchase

Stephen was flying F-8 Crusaders in the US and then C-130s in Vietnam and his friend was flying an A-4 Skyhawk. They had rented a house in South Laguna Beach when and wanted to have a plane that they could fly for fun. They originally wanted a bi-plane, but couldn’t find one that was affordable (they were making $300/month in the USMC) so they bought a PT-19 in January 1964 for $900 — a short 3 months before it ended up in the ocean!

I asked Stephen for photos of him with an airplane in the USMC or American Airlines and he basically said that he didn’t have any photos of himself and airplanes because he is superstitious. He related that when he first started flying and whenever a pilot was lost, a photo would appear with a caption similar to “this photo was taken shortly before pilot xxxx was lost.” Since then, he never wanted to have a photo with him posing with an airplane!

The photo above is pretty much the only photo he has of himself posing with an airplane. When he sent the photo he said “And you can see … I violated my own superstition and the result was nearly fatal!”

The Crash

At a Friday night party in Santa Ana with some friends, people were excited to go for a plane ride. On Saturday morning, he started taking people up one-at-a-time for a short 20 minute flight over Laguna Beach and back to San Juan Capistrano. After he had taken up a number of people, Susan Rutan (no relation to Burt Rutan) got in the backseat. She was a girlfriend of his friend. I had assumed that maybe she was his girlfriend that he took for a joy ride but he corrected me.

He had recently put in 17 gallons of Aviation Gas (at 50c a gallon). They took off and did a climbing left turn over the water and were at about 1,000 feet when the engine gave out. He switched tanks, the engine sputtered but didn’t restart. At the point, he told Susan that they were going to do a crash landing and he started the descent. Stephen had gone through the “Dilbert Dunker” simulated cockpit water crash simulator and figured that he would be okay but was worried about his passenger.

Contrary to the newspaper articles, he did NOT see the fishing vessel during the descent. They only saw the nearby boat after landing on the water. He put the airplane down gently and, to his delight, it didn’t flip or break apart. They had their flight suits on and got out on the wing just like a movie. Susan was getting ready to possibly swim the mile or so to land but Stephen put the kibosh on that given the 58F water temperature!

Life Rafts

His granddaughter had mentioned that they EACH had a life raft which seemed very odd to me so I asked him about it and e had a funny story.

Apparently both he and the co-owner weren’t very tall and they needed a “booster” since the seats in the PT-19 were fixed and didn’t have a height adjustment. His friend went to the salvage yard at El Toro airbase and found a couple seat packs from a Beechcraft and installed them into the seats to provide some extra height. Stephen had forgot about them until the crash!

Stephen looked through his archives and sent me the photos below of the airplane before it sank. It must have been taken from the fishing boat that came to rescue them. You can see them both on the life rafts. He kept the raft for many years but lost track of it at some point.

You can also see the stripes on the tail that match the stripes on photo of him in the airplane above.

Post Crash

Stephen had another funny story to tell me. After the crash, he filed a report and the NTSB opened an investigation per normal policy. Well, that turned out to be a bit of a problem.

There was a policy that any military pilot could obtain a civilian pilot license if they took a written test. He had gone to a regional office in Long Beach to take the exam but it was closed so he didn’t complete that. He got busy with USMC duty assignments (Yuma, Pt Mugu to shoot missiles, Survival School, etc.) and just never took the test.

He received a letter from Washington DC a couple months after the crash that statd “he was operating aircraft N50013 without a license” and got into some hot water. They said he could either (a) pay a $250 fine or (b) appeal and possibly pay up to $1000. Stephen new they had him “dead to rights” so he paid the $250 and moved on. 🙂

American Airlines

Like many military pilots, Stephen put his skills to work in the commercial aviation field after his military service. He flew for 30 years (!) for American Airlines. His first airplane was the Lockheed Electra and then was an engineer and co-pilot on the 727. He became a Captain and flew DC9s and MD-80s and flew out of Orange County for quite some time. He finished his career in a 767 on Flight AA136 to London out of LAX.

Thanks To…

Stephen’s granddaughter for reaching out to me and connecting me with Stephen.

A big thanks to Stephen for spending the time on a phone call and filling in the blanks and for all the fun stories he told about that airplane and about his career. It is stories like these that really make finding new wrecks fun.