Plane carrying six crashes off San Diego coast
Six people are feared dead after a light aircraft plummeted into the Pacific Ocean three miles south-west of San Diego, California.
The twin-engined Cessna 414 crashed on Sunday at lunchtime. It was the second accident involving a private plane in the area within a matter of weeks.
According to the US coastguard, which sent a helicopter, two rescue boats and a light aircraft to the scene, there was no sign of survivors.
The seven-seat Cessna took off from San Diego for Phoenix, Arizona and crashed less than 30 minutes later.
Local reports said the pilot told air traffic controllers that the plane was struggling to maintain its altitude before plunging into the ocean.
'A debris field has been located, but I do not currently have the size of it,' coastguard Petty Officer Ryan Graves told NBC 7.
'I saw him come down at an angle. He wasn't flying straight to the ground,' Tyson Wislofsky, a witness, told the station.
'The next time he came out of the clouds, he went straight into the water. But after I saw this splash, about six seconds later, it was dead silent. I knew that they went in the water, nose first, at a high speed.'
The first Cessna 414 entered service in 1968, and an updated version was introduced in 1978.
'This is a twin-engine turbo, a piston airplane, that can fly on one of the two engines. So you could lose an engine,' Jim Kidrick, chief executive of the San Diego Air and Space museum, told ABC7.
Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board are examining the cause of the accident.
The worst crash involving a Cessna 414 took place in July 1982 when 12 people, including American Christian singer Keith Green, died shortly after taking off from a small airport in Texas. Investigations blamed the accident on the plane being overloaded.
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