Aircraft down in water off Oceanside CA

From San Diego Union-Tribune:

SAN DIEGO - The Coast Guard located floating debris and an oil slick in the ocean Friday and were searching for survivors after a small airplane went down 30 miles off Oceanside.

Officials had not been able to identify the aircraft or anyone on board as of Friday night.

Boaters reported seeing a small civilian plane go nose down into the water about 10 miles from them and 25 miles east of San Clemente Island about 2 p.m., said Lt. Joshua Nelson of the U.S. Coast Guard station in San Diego.

It took the boaters 20 to 30 minutes to reach the spot, where they found aircraft debris about midway between the island and Oceanside, Nelson said.

Two Coast Guard vessels and private boaters searched for survivors, along with a Coast Guard MH-60 helicopter and a Marine Corps C-130 transport plane, Coast Guard Lt. j.g. Amanda Sardone said.

Coast Guard crews found small pieces of aluminum, plastic foam and carpet and a small oil slick consistent with a private plane, Nelson said.

Nelson said Coast Guard and Federal Aviation Administration officials were calling every airport control tower in Southern California along with flight schools and individual pilots, hoping to identify a missing plane.

Three Coast Guard vessels were to keep searching overnight and be joined at sunrise by a helicopter until there is no chance that anyone in the crash survived, Nelson said.

The Coast Guard initially cited reports that a plane that had taken off from Montgomery Field was unaccounted for, but later backed away from that account.

The following link is NOT from the accident aircraft. This is just to show the approximate area of the crash. The western-most point of THIS TRACK is right about where it apparently happened. This may be what the USCG was looking at when they said the plane took off from KMYF…but the times are all wrong so they retracted that statement. (My guess)

An excerpt from a local TV station’s website

FAA spokesman Ian Gregor said the pilot had checked out the red-and-white, single-engine Cessna 172 from the Golden Wings Flying Club at Montgomery Field in San Diego. The rented plane was registered to Blossom Valley Aviation LLC.

The pilot indicated he was going to make a round trip to French Valley, about 60 miles north, returning around 5 p.m.

The pilot was not planning to talk to air traffic controllers during his flight, and the FAA did not receive any mayday calls from pilots in the San Diego area, Gregor said.

No flight plan was filed, and I can’t find what the tail number was just yet, since it’s not up on the FAA site as of this posting.

If the pilot was really going to French Valley (F70), then he was quite a ways off course., unless some sightseeing was in the works.

I see seven 172s registered to Blossom Valley Aviation at the FAA’s website. I looked at the history for each of them and I couldn’t eliminate any possibilities from that.

I searched Airliners.net and Airport-Data.com and based on the FAA description it could be one of four aircraft:

N339SP
N5223E
N5424V
N726RJ

This is all assuming that they know for sure about the description.