Concord plane crash: Victim identified as Martinez man
Nothing could keep Christopher Rampoldt’s feet on the ground.
When an airline told him that he was too old at 34 to be hired as a pilot, Rampoldt became a flight attendant to stay up in the clouds. Later in life he would pilot his own plane.
On Tuesday, Rampoldt, who had been in the air in one way or another for 50 years, was identified as the pilot of the two-seat plane who died Monday in a crash near the Military Ocean Terminal in Concord. He was 69.
Born in Loma Linda (San Bernardino County) in 1948, Rampoldt first took to the air while studying at UC Riverside, said his wife, Vickie Dawes. Rampoldt and a group of friends would tie glider planes to the back of a car, catching the heat thermals over salt flats to get their planes in the air.
Les Goldner, who flew with Rampoldt for 15 years as part of the Liberty Field Flyers club, called him a “perfect pilot.” Goldner said that he believed the crash was caused by a mechanical breakdown in the plane or a medical issue while Rampoldt was flying.
“He was one of the world’s greatest pilots,” Goldner said. “If he crashed and died, it was no fault of his.”
Rampoldt moved to Alaska after school, where he flew bush planes and worked on earning instrument ratings to his pilot license that would qualify him to fly jets for commercial airlines.
With his license in hand, Rampoldt returned to Southern California and applied to be a pilot with Western Airlines. He was undeterred when they rejected him for his age.
“So that old man, that 34-year-old, took a job as a flight attendant because he just loved to fly,” Dawes said.
The job took Rampoldt all over the world, Dawes said. For a few months in the 1970s, Rampoldt worked for a charter airline in Kano, Nigeria, that ferried people for the hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca that Muslims are expected to make at least once in their lifetime.
Dawes and Rampoldt met in Tilden Park in the East Bay during a hike put together by the Sierra Club’s subgroup for singles. The couple settled down in Martinez but shared a love for travel — Dawes said they had just returned from a trip to Vietnam in November.
After he retired from being a flight attendant, Rampoldt liked to take his two-seat plane out on the weekends. Sometimes, Dawes said, she’d take the second seat in the plane and he would point out the landmarks in the distance.
He mastered every aspect of flying, she said, from his knowledge of the terrain to bringing the craft gently back to the ground.
No bumps, no bounces in the hundreds of flights they took together, she said.