Victim in plane crash near Half Moon Bay identified; 3 other occupants unaccounted for
The San Mateo County Coroner's Office identified one of the four people who were in a plane crash near Half Moon Bay on Sunday.
One of the victims was identified as 27-year-old Emma Pearl Willmer-Shiles of San Francisco.
The NTSB said she was one of four people on board the small, home-built plane. Retired airline captain Ross Sagun explains that even though the plane is assembled by whoever buys it, that doesn't make it unsafe.
"It's a proven design, however, having said that, it's up to the person building the airplane to properly construct it and maintain good engineering and building practices," he told CBS News Bay Area. "That's hard to guarantee."
A San Francisco native, Willmer-Shiles attended Sacred Heart Cathedral and later graduated from MIT. She holds several patents for engineering designs.
The four-seater plane she was flying in is registered to Winged Wallabies Inc. in Oakland and has conducted several flights over the Bay Area.
"Like I say, it's a well-tested design," Sagun explained. "I'd be surprised if there was a structural failure per se, but again, this was built by quote unquote amateur builders."
Also believed to be on board is Willmer-Shiles' MIT classmate Lochie Ferrier who is described by those who knew him as a "smart, capable pilot." He's believed to have been joined by his fiancé Cassidy Petit who works for a San Francisco venture capital firm.
The question investigators are tackling tonight: what caused the plane to crash.
According to Flight Aware, the plane departed from Hayward for Half Moon Bay and landed 35 minutes later at 5:04 p.m. Then, the NTSB said it departed Half Moon Bay around 7om and crashed in the water minutes later.
"Just now looking at the weather that occurred during the time of the incident, the accident, and I'd be looking real hard at the weather because what I'm seeing is the historical weather record shows that at the time of that they said that the incident occurred Half Moon Bay was reporting very low ceilings, or low clouds and fog and mist," Sagun said. "And of course, it was dark at the time of the accident … Once you get above that layer, assuming that it was a low layer, you lose all reference, you lose all sight of any kind of ground lighting. So you lose spatial orientation."
Sagun said the NTSB will look into it all, and that when answers do come about what went wrong, they may be complex.
"What we've learned over many years of accident investigation is that an accident usually isn't just caused by one break in the links in the chain but many," he explained. "It's like threading a needle through Swiss cheese. When all the holes align, then you have a bad incident and I think we're going to probably find that there wasn't just one or maybe even two things."
Lauren Toms contributed to this report.