Man Found Dead in Wreckage of Missing Plane

The charred wreckage of a light plane reported missing on a local flight was found Saturday morning, along with the body of a man believed to have been the pilot, authorities said.

The crashed Piper Cherokee was spotted in the Verdugo Mountains above Burbank by helicopters belonging to the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and a local news agency, said Lt. Col. Fred Beelby of the Civil Air Patrol.

The rented plane and its pilot, whose name was not released, went down at the 2,000-foot level of the mountains near Wildwood Canyon, about eight miles east of Burbank Airport, Beelby said. “The only thing left intact was the tail,” he said.

The cause of the crash was not immediately known.

Investigators described the pilot as a foreign national and an experienced pilot.

The single-engine, four-seat plane took off from Whiteman Air Park in Pacoima on Thursday afternoon for a 50-mile, 20-minute flight to Long Beach Municipal Airport, where the aircraft had been rented on the previous day, Beelby said.

The man had flown to the San Fernando Valley on business, Beelby said. The airplane rental agency reported him missing to the Federal Aviation Administration later Thursday when he didn’t return the craft as scheduled to Long Beach, he said.

Minutes after the takeoff from Whiteman, the plane passed through airspace monitored by the Burbank Airport staff. During routine contact with the air traffic control tower, the pilot did not report any problems, Beelby said, adding that the exchange had been the man’s last recorded conversation.

The wreckage was spotted about 8:15 a.m. Saturday by Marica and Robert Tur from their Los Angeles News Service helicopter, Beelby said. A Sheriff’s Department helicopter came upon the wreckage about the same time.

Marica Tur said she and her husband, a pilot-reporter for a local radio station, had heard about the missing plane and saw the wreckage 15 minutes after they took off from Santa Monica Airport.

She said it looked as though the plane had crashed head-on into the mountains.

“We kind of knew where to look,” she said. The area is known as a place where many private planes have crashed in recent years, she said.