A small private plane crashed Saturday in the Pacific about 40 miles west of Half Moon Bay following an emergency call for help, killing two people aboard.
The National Transportation Safety Board said the plane was a Viking Air DHC-6-400 Twin Otter, headed from Santa Rosa-Sonoma County airport to Honolulu.
The small, turboprop plane is listed on aviation sites as typically having a range of about 700 miles, but FAA records show the plane had been outfitted with a tank system to allow longer flights.
According to the National Transportation Safety Board, the plane took off from Santa Rosa about 8:20 a.m., but turned back headed for a small public airstrip at Half Moon Bay, crashing at 2:15 p.m.
Tracking by Flightradar showed the Twin Otter turboprop turned around about 10:40 a.m. and was headed back to Santa Rosa until around 1:15 p.m., when it redirected toward Half Moon Bay, and began descending. Fifteen minutes later it went down.
The U.S. Coast Guard out of San Francisco broadcast an alert at 1:40 p.m. of a “small plane in distress” southwest of the Farallon Islands and advised mariners to look for individuals in a yellow life raft.
National Transportation Safety Board spokesperson Sarah Taylor Sulick said the U.S. Coast Guard located the submerged plane and confirmed the pilot and copilot suffered fatal injuries. She said there were no other passengers onboard, and that NTSB investigators are working to recover the plane.
The identities of the pilot and copilot have not been released. The NTSB said it was still determining ownership of the plane.
The plane had been blocked by its owners from being followed by public flight tracking services.