3 Feared Dead in Offshore Helicopter Crash

A Southern California Edison helicopter carrying three people crashed in the ocean off Huntington Beach on Friday, and there were no signs of survivors.

Search aircraft located a man’s body about 12:15 p.m. floating face down near wreckage that was confirmed to be from the missing helicopter. The Coast Guard recovered the wreckage and an uninflated raft about three miles from the Huntington Beach Pier, but the body sank in deep water before it could be retrieved, said Lt. Carol Stearns, U.S. Coast Guard spokeswoman in Long Beach.

The aircraft, built by Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm in 1991 and purchased by the utility company in 1998, took off at 6:35 a.m. from an Edison facility in Irvine on a flight to Santa Catalina Island. A company spokeswoman said it carried a pilot and two passengers flying to a business meeting in Avalon.

The Coast Guard launched a sea and aerial search at 8 a.m. when notified by Edison that the helicopter had failed to arrive at Catalina at 7 a.m. as scheduled.

Lt. Cmdr. Charles Cashin said Huntington Beach lifeguards were called in to try to recover the body, which was discovered about four hours into the search. The hunt for survivors was called off at nightfall and will resume this morning at daybreak. Officials said they are hopeful that the other two people aboard the helicopter would be found alive.

Southern California Edison spokeswoman Emiko Banfield would not identify the two passengers and pilot, citing attempts to notify their next of kin. She also declined to provide the passengers’ job titles except to identify them as “employees, not executives.”

Later in the evening, Tom Boyd, another Edison spokesman, said the victims’ families had been notified, and each family requested that the identity not be released until the body is recovered.

Banfield said the missing employees, two men and a woman, were bound for a routine meeting on Santa Catalina, where the utility operates power distribution and generating stations.

The pilot was “very experienced,” Banfield said, and the helicopter had not had any mechanical breakdowns since it was purchased. She said the passengers and pilot were wearing life vests.

Coast Guard officials said the pilot called the Edison facility in Irvine at 6:42 a.m., about seven minutes after taking off, saying he was starting to fly over water. It was the aircraft’s last transmission, Stearns said, and “there never was a report of trouble.”

The helicopter had an emergency locater transmitter, to help searchers pinpoint its location, but the signal never went off, Stearns said.

When the helicopter took off Friday, Coast Guard officials said, the weather was overcast and the ceiling only 300 feet, with visibility about 1 1/2 miles.

Investigators probing the cause of the crash Friday said they were not sure if weather was a factor.