Body Found in Wreckage of Plane Near Topanga

TOPANGA — The badly burned body of a pilot who had been missing for a day after taking off from a San Joaquin Valley airport was found Friday afternoon in the wreckage of the plane in the Santa Monica Mountains, authorities said.

The body had not been identified late Friday, said Deputy Michael Irving of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. It was so badly burned the sex could not immediately be determined.

The Sheriff’s Department Aero Bureau got a call about 2:30 p.m. Friday from the Civil Air Patrol in San Francisco, indicating that an aircraft was missing over the mountains near Malibu and may have crashed there sometime the night before, Irving said.

A sheriff’s helicopter crew sighted the wreckage of the single-engine Cessna 210 about 15 minutes later 30 feet down a canyon just off a dirt road near Stunt and Saddle Peak roads, he said.

All the fuel in the red plane had burned in a small fire that charred the craft and blackened grass and a few bushes and small trees around it, said Clifford Dysart, a Los Angeles County Fire Department battalion chief.

Irving said the plane took off from an airport in the Fresno area--possibly Visalia--sometime Thursday. Its destination was not known.

The San Francisco Civil Air Patrol indicated the last known radio contact with the pilot occurred between 11:30 a.m. and noon Thursday, Irving said. Its last known radar reading placed it near where the wreckage was found.

Because there were no witnesses, authorities say the plane probably went down in the dark--possibly late Thursday or early Friday.

Heavy fog may have played a part in the accident, Irving said.

Fog also may have kept the fire from spreading into the steep, fire-prone terrain, Dysart said.

“We were very lucky in that way,” he said. “If it had been in different weather the fire may have been worse.”

The accident remained under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration.