Washington Plane Crash Kills Anaheim Man
An Anaheim man was one of two men killed Sunday night when a small plane crashed shortly after takeoff from a private airstrip on Shaw Island, San Juan County Sheriff William G. Cumming said.
Killed in the crash of the Beechcraft Baron BE-58 were C. Larry Cornelius, 39, of Anaheim and the plane’s registered owner, Edward C. Darling, 38, of Bellingham, the sheriff’s office reported.
The pilot got an FAA briefing from the Seattle Flight Center before takeoff, but there was no indication a flight plan was filed nor that there were any radio messages of trouble before the crash, said Dick Meyer, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration in Seattle.
This morning FAA and National Transportation Safety Board investigators were headed for the island in the San Juan Islands chain about 75 miles northwest of Seattle.
The plane went down in clear weather, and there were no reports of unusually strong winds, Meyer said.
The plane was badly damaged, but there was no fire, a news release from the sheriff’s office said.
The airstrip is “carved out of the trees . . . in a rather isolated location” on the island about 20 miles southwest of Bellingham, he said.
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