Plane crash off coast kills four

Newport Beach developer, OCC aviation instructor are among those onboard Cessna.A Newport Beach real estate developer and an Orange Coast College aviation instructor were among four people onboard a small private plane that crashed off the coast of San Clemente Saturday afternoon, officials said.

Pilot Dan Newman and passengers Jason Baldwin, Jeff TenEyck and Rick Olavson were likely killed when their plane crashed two miles off the coast and sank in 200 feet of water, officials said.

Newman taught flying lessons part-time at Orange Coast College, and Baldwin was a Newport real estate developer. Olavson was a developer based in Los Angeles. TenEyck, who grew up in Laguna Beach, lived in Wyoming.

“We don’t know what happened,” said Kelley Renezeder, Baldwin’s sister. “We fly in it [the plane] all the time.”

The four men were returning from Mexico, where they had been at the Baja 1000, an off-road racing competition that Baldwin, along with other members of his family, competed in, officials said.

The single-engine, fixed-wing Cessna 210 took off from San Felipe, Mexico, and made a stop at San Diego’s Brown Field Municipal Airport.

The plane was bound for John Wayne Airport, U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Tony Migliorini said.

The plane was registered to Newport Beach company TR Builder Corp., which is owned by Baldwin’s father, James Baldwin, according to Federal Aviation Administration records.

Rodney Foster, the department chairman of aviation pilot training at Orange Coast College, said Newman had flown for the Baldwin family for about 10 years.

Newman had been a flight instructor for 14 years and always flew in small planes similar to the Baldwins’ Cessna, Foster said.

“It wasn’t like he was used to flying 737s or 747s and got into an unknown plane,” Foster said. “It’s a shock to the aviation community.”

Baldwin, 36, and TenEyck, 35, were childhood friends in Laguna Beach, Renezeder said.

Matt Brown of Eugene, Ore., graduated from Laguna Beach High School with Baldwin and TenEyck. He heard about the plane crash from a friend.

“They were both really great guys,” Brown said. “He [Baldwin] loved the thrill, and that’s why he was racing [in the Baja 1000].”

Brown said TenEyck called to wish him a happy birthday just last week.

“We were all born really close together, so we all grew up together,” Brown said of a close group of friends that included Baldwin and TenEyck.

Authorities did not know what caused the plane to crash. The pilot did not make a distress call, said Lt. Erin Giudice of the Orange County Sheriff’s Harbor Patrol.

A passenger on the Spirit of Dana Point, a boat owned by the Ocean Institute, called the Harbor Patrol at 2:06 p.m. after seeing the plane go down.

Using radar data, air traffic controllers determined that the plane was flying steadily, heading northwest at 3,500 feet, when it suddenly went into a rapid descent, said Nicole Charnon, an air safety investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board.

A harbor patrol underwater search and rescue team used sonar equipment to locate the plane late Saturday.

The wreckage remained on the ocean floor as of late Sunday, Giudice said.

A flight manual, credit cards, credit-card receipts and a stack of paperwork on how to repair an airplane engine were found on the ocean’s surface after the crash, Giudice said.

Salvage crews are expected to raise the plane from the water early in the week, Charnon said.