Helicopter crash kills two Edison workers
By Daniel Wolowicz camarillo@theacorn.com

CRASH SITE-An investigator inspects the wreckage of a Southern California Edison helicopter that crashed at a Somis ranch on Wednesday. The pilot and passenger were killed in the accident.

Two Southern California Edison employees were killed Wednesday afternoon around 2 p.m. when their helicopter crashed at a rural Somis ranch.

Officials with the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration are investigating what caused the Hughes 369D helicopter to crash off a dirt road in the WD Sence Ranch.

The 1,700-acre property is situated behind the Solano Verdes Ranches gated community off Bradley Road and Highway 118.

A Sence Ranch employee said the crash was reported by a woman who boards her horse at one of the many stables on the property.

Flying out of Edison's facility in Ventura, the pilot, Benny Kleven, and passenger Keith King were on a routine inspection flight to check on power lines, an Edison spokesman said.

"We have a lot of facilities that are remotely located so in areas like this we don't have the means to get up to the actual towers and

do visual inspections, so we utilize aircraft," Edison spokesman Rudy Gonzales said.

Gonzales said Southern California Edison's service area covers 50,000 square miles, and a fleet of about five helicopters is used to check power lines in rural locations.

Kleven, a 41-year-old resident of Temecula, joined Edison in June 2006 having flown as a helicopter pilot for 22 years, Gonzales said.

"He was a wonderful man," said Kleven's wife of 11 years, Blanca Kleven. "He was full of life. You would never see him upset. He was nice to everybody."

Blanca said her husband learned to fly in the Royal Norwegian Air Force.

"He enjoyed flying," she said.

Kleven had an 8-year-old son, Sean, and a 19-year-old daughter, Barbara.

King, a 48-year-old Ojai resident, had worked with Edison for nearly 30 years.

His 22-year-old son, Simon, said he wasn't ready to talk about his dad.

Although the helicopter clipped a power line in the accident, Gonzales said there was no power outage reported in the area.

The Hughes turbo-shaft engine helicopter built in 1980 was registered to Southern California Edison, according to the FAA.

The helicopter crash is the second fatal aircraft accident in Somis in a little over two months.

On July 1, two members of a Santa Barbara family were killed and two others were injured when their single engine plane crashed into a drainage ditch in a Somis lemon orchard.

In May 1999, a Southern California Edison helicopter transporting two workers from Irvine to Catalina Island crashed into the Pacific Ocean about six miles west of the Huntington Beach Pier, according to National Transportation Safety Board reports.