Six people died Sunday afternoon when a small plane crashed in the ocean off the coast of San Diego, the Federal Aviation Administration said Monday.
The twin-engine Cessna crashed around 12:30 p.m., about five minutes after taking off from San Diego International Airport and began heading to Phoenix.
“Mayday! Mayday!” the pilot can be heard saying in an air traffic control audio recording from LiveATC.net.
The distress call was made shortly after the pilot told air traffic controllers he was struggling to maintain his heading and climb. The air traffic controller advised the pilot to land at a nearby Naval Air Station, but he replied he could not see the airfield.
The crash kicked off a large-scale search and rescue operation by the Coast Guard that morphed into a search and recovery operation with a large debris field that continued into Monday.
The depth of the water in the search area is roughly 200 feet, the Coast Guard said.
The FAA’s initial report said the plane crashed “under unknown circumstances” and was destroyed.
“I saw him come down at an angle. He wasn’t flying straight to the ground,” surfer Tyson Wislofsky, who witnessed the crash, told NBC San Diego. “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 National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the cause of the crash. The identities of the deceased have not been released.
The crash comes two weeks after a private jet crashed in a San Diego neighborhood after hitting power line in foggy weather, killing six.
