Pilot and Teenage Daughter Killed After a Kit-Built Plane Tore Through a Fullerton Furniture Warehouse Roof

A kit-built Van’s RV-10 dropped through the roof of a furniture plant near Fullerton Municipal Airport on January 2, 2025, at about 2:09 p.m. Pacific time. The airplane, registered N8757R, was destroyed. The pilot, Pascal Reid, and his 16-year-old daughter, Kelly Reid, were killed. Nineteen people on the factory floor were hurt. Early local counts said 11 injured. Hospitals and the National Transportation Safety Board later settled on two dead and 19 injured on the ground, eight of them seriously.

The building sat in the 2300 block of Raymer Avenue, inside a crowded industrial pocket that lives under the approach to runway 24. Fire crews treated the call as both a crash and a hazardous-materials problem until they knew what the racks held. They held foam and wood furniture stock. The airplane struck pallet frames loaded with that material, came to rest upright about six feet off the floor on a crushed rack, and burned.

What the NTSB Put on Paper

The Board opened file WPR25FA072 and, at the end of January 2025, posted a preliminary report that changed the public story from “small plane hits warehouse” to a specific mechanical and human sequence. The flight was a personal trip under Part 91, not an airliner run. Witnesses and video showed the airplane in a left turn, then a right roll with the nose dropping, then a dive into the roof about 1,500 feet short of the approach end of runway 24.

The detail that traveled farthest was the door. Investigators wrote that the pilot’s door appeared to be open in the last moments of the flight. An unintelligible radio transmission went out around the time of the left turn. The engine could still be heard operating about a second before impact. That combination — power on, door ajar, late turn, roof instead of runway — is why kit-plane forums and local newsrooms seized on the same sentence. A door that is not latched on a Van’s RV-10 is not a cosmetic problem. It is an in-flight handling problem.

The preliminary report is not a probable-cause finding. NTSB prelims describe wreckage, weather, radar, and what cameras caught. They do not close the file. The final report, when it arrives, is the document that will say whether the open door, a control issue, a medical event, or some stack of those things put the airplane into the furniture racks. Until then, anyone selling a single-cause story is selling ahead of the Board.

Two Investigations That Should Not Share a Podium

The safety board owns the wreckage. The city and county own the map. Fullerton Municipal is a busy general-aviation field with a relatively short runway and industrial buildings packed against the arrival path. That geometry is not a secret. It is a land-use choice that gets defended in planning hearings and then reappears when an amateur-built airplane fails to make the pavement.

Those two files should not be collapsed into one press conference. One is about a machine and a pilot. The other is about how close a furniture plant is allowed to sit under a corridor that weekend fliers use every afternoon. Orange County and the City of Fullerton will be asked, as every city under a small-airport fence is asked after a roof strike, whether zoning still matches the traffic the airport actually generates.

Workers on the floor did not choose to stand under an experimental airplane. They clocked into a factory. The injury list — eight serious, 11 minor, plus two dead in the aircraft — is the human cost of that map. Firefighters pulled people out of smoke that came from foam, wood, avgas, and a composite airframe. That is why the first hours looked like a hazmat job. No one on the first-due engine knew what was in the racks.

The People in the Airplane

Pascal Reid was identified as the pilot and as the owner-builder associated with the RV-10. Kelly Reid, 16, was a student-athlete. Their names moved from “two fatalities” to a father-and-daughter story within a day. That framing is true and incomplete. It is also a reminder that experimental amateur-built aircraft are often family projects. The category exists because the FAA allows people to build and fly their own machines under rules that are lighter than those for certified production airplanes. The trade is supposed to be accepted risk for the people who signed the airworthiness paperwork, not for the warehouse crew a quarter-mile from the threshold.

Kit-plane culture already knew the RV-10 as a fast four-seat homebuilt with a reputation for performance. Performance does not forgive an unlatched door or a late, low turn over a furniture plant. Aviation Safety Network and the NTSB docket will remain the primary records. Local television will remain the source of the fireball clip. Those two streams should not be confused.

What a Roof Strike Does to a City

A warehouse fire next to an airport is a logistics problem as much as a safety problem. Streets close. Hazardous-material units sit on foam and solvents. The airport itself has to account for wreckage off the field and for the rumor mill that follows any crash on short final. Fullerton’s field kept operating in the days after the accident because that is what municipal airports do. The plant did not.

The AEGIS Alliance will follow the docket, not the first aerial that filled a homepage. For another sudden-impact file on this desk, see the self-driving Tesla that ended up on Santa Monica light-rail tracks. Different vehicles. Same demand for a record instead of a viral still. Readers who want the broader California emergency file can also start with the 11-hour avalanche rescue that pulled climbers off a 12,000-foot slope. Different altitude. Same rule: the official timeline beats the first number on television.

The Questions That Belong in the Final Report

Did the door come open because of a latch, a passenger, or an in-flight failure? Did the pilot have time to fly the airplane after the door opened? Was the airplane stable in the last turn, or already departing controlled flight? Were the people on the factory floor inside a building that should never have been that close to a short-field approach? Those are the questions the final NTSB report is built to answer. They are not questions a city council can close with a moment of silence.

General aviation in Southern California is not a hobby in empty air. It is a grid of small fields, warehouses, freeways, and housing that grew up around those fields after the runways were already poured. Every time an experimental airplane fails to make the pavement, the map gets another hearing it should have had before the roof opened. The AEGIS Alliance will treat WPR25FA072 as an open safety file until the Board publishes probable cause, and as a land-use file for as long as Fullerton keeps industrial work under that arrival path.

Nineteen people went to hospitals because an airplane that was supposed to land on runway 24 landed on their shift instead. Two people in the cockpit did not get that chance. That is the whole story until the docket says otherwise.