 Shortly after taking off from San Diego, the airliner was flying at around 2,000 feet on its way to Imperial Valley, California, when the pilot of the biplane buzzed the airliner and, misjudging its speed, collided with it.The army pilot, Lieutenant Howard W. Keefer, tried to bail out of the wreckage, but his parachute got entangled, and both aircraft crashed near the Lexington Park subdivision of eastern San Diego on the side of a canyon.All five people aboard the Tri-Motor and the Army pilot, who was found “criminally negligent” for approaching the airliner, died in the crash.