

Officials said Eddie Andreini of Half Moon Bay was piloting the Stearman biplane when it crashed in an open field away from spectators at 2:05 p.m. Black smoke rose from the wreckage as the tens of thousands of people who had flocked to the "Thunder Over Solano" show were evacuated from the base.

Andreini's plane was inverted and flying close to the ground, performing a maneuver known as "cutting a ribbon," when something went wrong, said Col. David Mott, 60th Operations Group commander at the base.


Angie Giles from Antioch, a spectator, said the plane "flipped over to do a trick and hit the ground and dragged over the ground."

"It was a couple flames at first and then a lot of black smoke," said another spectator, Luis Alcocer, 18. "Everybody was just staring in awe."

The crash happened on the second day of the weekend air show, the first day of which attracted 85,000 spectators. The rest of Sunday's performance was canceled.

Andreini had flown planes since he was 16 years old and had performed stunts in shows for the past 25 years, Mott said.

Winds were blowing Sunday at 11 to 17 mph, Mott said. He said that was not as windy as during Saturday's show, which the colonel called uneventful.

Andreini's website says he put on "a fast-paced show that will delight any audience. ... Your audience will be thrilled at the sight of this huge biplane performing double outside loops, square loops, torque rolls, double snap rolls, and ... a heart-stopping, end-over-end tumble maneuver."

The Stearman biplane is a World War II-era aircraft that was commonly used to train pilots. Andreini's two-seat, fixed-wing, single-engine plane was built in 1944, records show.

Steve Stavrakakis, a pilot from Turlock (Stanislaus County), performed an hour before the crash in his Romanian military IAR 823 airplane. He had already packed up and left the base when a fellow pilot told him what had happened.

"It's a tragic loss. We're a tight-knit group," he said. "Any time something like this happens, it's devastating to our family."

Stavrakakis said Andreini was one of the last people he spoke with before leaving the show.

"You never think that when you say 'bye' it's the last time," Stavrakakis said. "He was a heck of a nice guy. He was well respected in the industry by everybody. Nobody flew a Stearman better than Eddie."

Andreini's air-show business was based at the Half Moon Bay Airport. The airfield's manager, Gretchen Kelly, called him "the patriarch of the airport community."

"We are all just devastated," Kelly said. "He was a very kind man - just the nicest man you could ever meet."


Stephanie M. Lee and Evan Sernoffsky are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. E-mail: slee@sfchronicle.com, esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @stephaniemlee, @evansernoffsky