Vintage Plane Crashes Into Lake, Killing 7

Seven people were believed killed Saturday when a World War II bomber crashed in a Northern California lake, its abrupt nose dive into shallow waters witnessed by scores of spectators gathered onshore for a convention of seaplanes.

Organizers of the 11th annual “Seaplane Fly-In” said that just before the crash, the twin-engine Lockheed P2V Harpoon had made four low passes over the spectators and floating seaplanes offshore, and had performed a series of dangerous maneuvers.

The plane was not a part of the festivities, according to Walter Windus, vice president and west coast director of the Seaplane Pilots Assn., which helped sponsor the show at Clear Lake, about 100 miles north of San Francisco.

“He was strictly an intruder,” said Windus, who also witnessed the crash. “He saw an opportunity to show off and he took advantage of it. He was doing air maneuvers that were not appropriate to that type of aircraft.

“A guy made a mistake, and took a number of people with him. He has left a long string of debris and remorse along the way.”

Identities of the dead or missing were not released. By sundown, only three bodies had been recovered, but Federal Aviation Administration officials said four more were still in the water.

The plane took off from the Sonoma County Airport in Santa Rosa, south of Lake County, with seven people aboard, an FAA investigator said. The pilot was from Santa Rosa, officials said, and his brother was believed to have died in the crash as well.

The airplane broke apart on impact in six-foot-deep water, scattering debris across the lake and making recovery efforts difficult. Much of the wreckage was buried deep in mud, and murky waters also hampered the effort by two dozen searchers.

A team of divers was to resume the search for more bodies this morning.

The crash occurred at 12:29 p.m. In the minutes before, the pilot had given the crowd an unsolicited and harrowing display of his prowess at the controls of the bulky aircraft, a model employed late in World War II and in the Korean War by the Navy, mainly to track and destroy submarines.

Several hundred people were scattered around the water’s edge at the time of the crash. The pilot’s maneuvers and low passes over the crowd and seaplanes caused concern.

“This guy was going really close to other planes, buzzing two of them in particular,” said Debbie Fields, an owner of the lake’s On The Waterfront jet ski rental shop. “Each time he did it, it would draw our attention, so we kept watching him. One guy we were with kept saying you can’t fly those planes like that.”

Organizers of the seaplane convention said they tried desperately to contact the pilot of the mystery plane by radio, intending to tell him to leave, but could not reach him.

“His behavior was so obnoxious,” Windus said, “I was going to tell him to go away or I was going to report him to the FAA.”

On its last pass, Fields said, the plane leveled off and then “did something similar to a barrel roll. There was no hope for him then; he went straight down.”

The plane crashed about 50 yards offshore on the lake’s west end, said Walt Smith, an FAA official working out of nearby Santa Rosa. There were no survivors, he said.

Pilots of seaplanes floating nearby hurried to the crash site, but found there were no traces of any survivors.

“The plane blew up at impact,” said Keith Grebner, 17, one of the first to arrive at the scene in a boat. “There was a lot of wood, carpet and a lot of human (remains) floating around in the water.”

A federal transportation safety official was en route to investigate.

Clear Lake, about one mile north of Lakeport City in Lake County, is California’s largest clear-water lake. A popular Northern California recreation site, it is each year host to the “Fly-In,” an annual gathering of seaplanes and their pilots at the Skylark Motel.

Windus said the seaplane convention would go on today as planned.

Times staff writer Jesse Katz contributed to this story.