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Tom Quist was an adventure-seeking pilot who fished by seaplane in Alaska and swooped down on rural highways during visits to Iowa. The past 10 years of his life had been dedicated to reviving a Bakersfield aviation company with a cursed history.
Kevin Kaff was a 22-year-old aspiring commercial pilot who spent Friday nights working on his own kit plane and "loved being above," his mother said.
Charles Oliver, a charter jet pilot, had just bought the performance aircraft of his dreams, a lipstick-red Questair Venture that cost him $130,000 and could buzz around at 300 mph.
Jean Bustos, an Air Force veteran, was the daughter of a pilot and the wife of an Air Force mechanic, and had logged hundreds of hours in the cockpit herself.
The four were killed in a midair plane collision over the heavily traveled Newhall Pass on Monday, Quist and Kaff in a Bellanca Citabria, Oliver and Bustos in Oliver's experimental Questair Venture.
Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board have moved the wreckage to a private hangar in Compton, where they will try to reconstruct the moments before the accident.
NTSB officials also will look at air traffic control data from the Federal Aviation Administration, information on the aircraft, and the pilots' backgrounds and qualifications.
All four victims shared a love of flying, choosing a way of life that often put them in small, lightweight planes that fly at low altitudes. When their two planes crashed over Sylmar, the pilots were flying under "see and avoid" rules and not relying on radar or air traffic controllers.
Quist, 45, had logged thousands of hours...