Body Recovered in Plane Crash : Search: Up to five other people are missing. Wreckage is found in ocean off Carpinteria hours after the twin-engine craft left Van Nuys Airport.

One man is dead and a search is underway at sea for several other people believed missing in a twin-engine plane that crashed into the ocean off Santa Barbara, authorities said Wednesday.

The plane, which the owner told authorities may have been carrying as many as six people, took off Tuesday night from Van Nuys Airport.

The skipper of a crew boat ferrying workers to offshore oil rigs said he discovered the body of a man floating amid the wreckage of the Piper Seneca PA-34 aircraft about one mile from the pier at Carpinteria early Wednesday.

“We started finding seats, then we found a jacket and a camcorder bag, and then we found the body and called the Coast Guard,” said Dion Dante, 22, of Ventura, captain of the Norma Tide. “He was maybe 30 years old, a white man, brown hair, wearing a sweat shirt and cowboy boots.”

Flotation devices kept a portion of the plane’s fuselage above water, Dante said.

A team of five scuba divers from the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department spent the daylight hours searching for other bodies, Sheriff’s Deputy Tim Gracey said.

A U. S. Coast Guard helicopter and two rescue boats were also used in the search. A spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board said the agency is investigating the crash but could give no details Wednesday.

The airplane’s owner, a Granada Hills man who was not on the flight, told authorities that a student and an instructor were aboard the aircraft for a training flight. “The possibility exists that they were accompanied by two other couples,” Gracey said.

The Santa Barbara County coroner’s office did not release the name of the man whose body was found Wednesday, pending notification of his family.

Gracey said the 32-year-old Los Angeles man was neither the instructor nor the student pilot identified by the aircraft’s owner.

Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Elly Brekke said the pilot telephoned an FAA office at Hawthorne Airport at 10:37 p.m. Tuesday to check weather conditions between Van Nuys and Long Beach and between Van Nuys and Santa Barbara, records show.

During the call, the pilot told the FAA employee that he was planning to leave Van Nuys in 20 minutes, Brekke said.

The air traffic control tower at Van Nuys Airport closes at 10:45 p.m. and there is no record of the aircraft’s departure before that time, Brekke said.

Under normal weather conditions, pilots are not required to file a flight plan with airport authorities or the FAA, Brekke said.