GIRL'S PLANE WAS OVERLOADED, EXPERT SAYS.

Byline: Matthew L. Wald The New York Times

An investigator from the National Transportation Safety Board said Friday evening that the single-engine plane that crashed Thursday, killing Jessica Dubroff, 7, her father, Lloyd, and her flight instructor, was overweight when it left the airport at Cheyenne, Wyo., in a thunderstorm.

And the pattern of injuries to the hands and wrists of the flight instructor, Joe Reid, 52, suggested that he was flying the plane, according to the investigator, Steven McCreary, who spoke at a news conference at the Weld County Airport in Greeley, Colo., where the wreckage of the Cessna 177B was taken Thursday night.

McCreary gave the briefing in a hangar where he stood in front of the wreckage. The plane's 180-horsepower engine dangled from a tow-truck hook.

McCreary would not say by how much the plane was overloaded or for certain whether it was Reid who was piloting the plane. But the tapes from the airport tower, he said, recorded the flight controllers advising the Cessna that another private plane that had just taken off was reporting wind shear, a condition in which wind direction changes rapidly, which can cause a plane to lose its lift. The report was acknowledged by a male voice, McCreary said.

The evidence suggesting that the plane crashed because of errors by the flight instructor came after a long day of debate nationwide about the flight, in which Jessica was seeking to become the youngest person to pilot a plane across the continent.

Reid, based at Half Moon Bay in Northern California, had logged 1,400 hours of flying, McCreary said, but it was not clear how much of that was from high-altitude airports.

Calculating the weight limit of a plane requires allowing for the altitude. In the mountains the air is thinner, robbing the engine of power. If the plane left the Cheyenne airport with the same passengers, baggage load and fuel as it carried when it left California the previous day, it might well have been overweight.

McCreary also said there was no evidence of a mechanical malfunction by the plane's engine or frame. He said that investigators had not yet analyzed what role, if any, was played by the foul weather.

Even as many experts cringed at the idea of a 7-year-old at the controls of an airplane, officials of the Federal Aviation Administration insisted Friday that none of the children who said they had piloted a plane across the country had actually done so, and that the agency's rules, which allow children at the controls, are fine as they are.

Nationwide, from television shows to flight schools, people Friday talked about the crash. But the gap between public perception and the FAA's stand was huge, rooted in the agency's understanding of what is meant by piloting.

``I heard a local newscaster last night talking about underage pilots,'' said Gabe Bruno, an FAA official who helped begin a campaign in 1989 to discourage cross-country flights like Jessica's. ``But there are no `under-age pilots'; there are no pilots under 16.''

To the FAA, Bruno said, Jessica was a passenger; a pilot is someone with a license.

And the person with the license in Jessica's plane was Reid, the flight instructor.

``No matter what the publicity says, no matter what the hype that was given to this flight, Jessica was a passenger in that airplane with her hands manipulating the controls,'' David Hinson, the FAA administrator, said in an interview Friday on the ABC News program ``Good Morning America.''

Rep. John ``Jimmy'' Duncan Jr., R-Tenn., who is the chairman of a House Aviation subcommittee, said Friday that he thought ``it is a crime that a 7-year-old was allowed to fly this plane.''

Duncan said he would introduce legislation that would make the practice illegal.