2 Rescued Hours After Small Plane Plunges Into Ocean : Crash: Coast Guard pulls men from sea about 13 miles off Newport Beach, but pilot is still missing. Good conditioning saved them, doctor says.

For six hours, Chul Hong Kim kept moving in the open ocean seven miles off Santa Catalina Island. A former competitive swimmer, he called on all his strength to stay afloat as the Coast Guard frantically searched for him in the darkness.

Separated from two colleagues who had gone down with him in a small aircraft 13 miles west of Newport Beach, Kim, 34, did not know if he was the only one alive--until the miraculous moment Monday morning when rescuers on the cutter Tybee heard his screams and plucked him from the ocean six hours after the crash.

Good fortune contributed to Kim and Kwan Hue Lee, 32, surviving the accident relatively unharmed, but it was also because of conditioning, doctors and rescuers said.

“That’s what saved their lives, there’s no question in my mind,” said Dr. Diane Birnbaumer, the emergency room physician at Harbor/UCLA Medical Center in Carson who treated the men.

By Monday afternoon, rescuers had called off a search for the plane’s missing pilot, credited with skillfully setting the aircraft down in the surf when his lone engine failed. The sister of former Korean Air Force pilot Sang Ho Han, 34, asked all seagoing vessels to search for her brother.

Rescuers aboard the Tybee, who used searchlights and flares in the darkness, found Lee at 10:30 p.m. Sunday, swimming the backstroke in two- and three-foot ocean swells with his eyeglasses still on, rhythmically chanting “Rescue, rescue, rescue,” said the cutter’s commander, Lt. Dwight D. Mathers.

They pulled him from the water dazed and bloated with early signs of hypothermia, more than three hours after Han reported trouble with the engine of his Mooney Mark 20 plane and disappeared from Federal Aviation Administration radar.

Rescuers found Kim, who told them that he swam competitively in high school, in good condition at 1:20 a.m. Monday. He broke down and cried when he learned one of his friends had been saved and immediately volunteered to help search for the pilot, Mathers said.

Both men were airlifted to the hospital with body temperatures near normal and healthy vital signs. Neither had a flotation device when the Tybee pulled alongside them, but Lee told doctors he had clutched an inflated bag or plastic container for a time.

The Tybee, a 110-foot cutter based in San Diego, arrived at the crash area at 10 p.m. Thirty minutes later, the crew heard Lee’s rhythmic screams and cut the engines.

“It was hard to hear anything,” said Seaman Edward Corrington. “I wasn’t sure if it was just in my head. Then I realized I did hear him.”

Nearly the entire 15-person crew ran to the deck and began shouting into the night, shooting off flares in search of the voice. A lookout was stationed at the cutter’s bow to prevent the vessel from running over Lee.

Lee was so dazed he did not realize he had been rescued until Seaman Brian Putnam swam to him in a wet suit with a torpedo-shaped flotation device.

On Monday night, Kim said he did not know how he survived. “After three hours, I almost gave up,” he said, “ but I didn’t want to die. I was scared, so I just kept myself afloat.”

Putnam said this was the fourth plane crash he has been assigned to and the first time he has ever come across anything. “All the other times, there were no people, no wreckage,” said Putnam, who said he was “very happy” to pull two people from the water.

Times staff writer Don Lee contributed to this story.