As rescue crews on Friday discovered the bodies of three people in the wreckage of an Orange County-based tour airplane that crashed in the rain on a remote Catalina Island hilltop, questions emerged about the pilot's qualifications to handle charter flights.
A search-and-rescue team found the burned bodies after a helicopter spotted the downed plane on a hilltop area near Mt. Orizaba, southwest of Catalina's Airport in the Sky, said Sgt. John Hudson of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's Avalon Station.
Although the victims have not been officially identified, they are believed to be pilot Mark Hogland, 48, president of a Dana Point charter flight company, and two passengers, according to U.S. Coast Guard officials.
Authorities said that the passengers apparently were tourists.
"There were no survivors," Hudson said.
Hogland flew the fixed-wing Beechcraft Bonanza aircraft out of Orange County's John Wayne Airport at 1:30 p.m. Thursday.
He took off from the island at 4:50 p.m. that day and was expected to return to John Wayne at 5:10 p.m.
The Coast Guard and law enforcement officials began searching Catalina and nearby waters with patrol boats and aircraft after Hogland's fiancee reported that she had not heard from him.
The passengers, a man and a woman, were out-of-state visitors staying at the Ritz-Carlton resort in Dana Point, but their identities had not been released pending family notification, said Orange County Sheriff's Department spokesman Jim Amormino.
It was raining and cloudy when the plane took off from the island, making weather and poor visibility probable factors in the crash.
Catalina's tiny airport is a narrow, single landing strip on a remote hilltop with precipitous drop-offs; some pilots compare it to landing on an aircraft carrier.
In the last decade, 20 people have died in eight plane crashes coming in or out of Airport in the Sky, including the three killed in Thursday's incident. Before that wreck, the most recent was just over three months ago, when three people were killed in a crash off the end of the runway.
Aviation experts said they did not consider the airfield a safety problem because few of the accidents over the years have occurred close to the runway, and many have taken place over water.
"It's not a lot of accidents," said Chris Dancy, spokesman for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Assn. "You're looking at fewer than one fatal accident per year at an airport that sees more than 10,000 flights every year."
