Coast Guard Plane Hits Helicopter at San Clemente Island
Military helicopters and ships scoured the waters off San Diego on Friday morning for any trace of nine people involved in a mid-air collision between a Coast Guard plane and a military helicopter hours earlier.
But after nearly 12 hours of searching, rescue teams had reported no signs of any survivors.
Seven people were aboard the Coast Guard’s C-130 plane and two were flying in the Marine Corps’ AH-1 Cobra helicopter when the two aircraft crashed at 7:10 p.m. Pacific time, officials said. They were flying 15 to 25 miles east of San Clemente Island, a narrow strip of land off the southern California coast used by the Navy for training exercises.
Military officials said they did not know how the crash had occurred, or which aircraft might have struck the other.
Jetta Disco, a Coast Guard spokeswoman, said the Coast Guard plane had been dispatched on a search-and-rescue call to look for a 12-foot dinghy that had been reported as being overdue to arrive, but had no more details on the original rescue mission or whether the lost boat had turned up.
Ms. Disco said the Marine helicopter had been performing training exercises.
A pilot in the area reported seeing a fireball in the area near the crash, and debris from the Coast Guard C-130 had been spotted, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration told The Associated Press.
Rescue teams from the Navy and Coast Guard swarmed to the scene minutes after the crash occurred, Ms. Disco said, and spent the night searching the calm 65-degree waters for any sign of survivors. Authorities told reporters that the search conditions on Thursday night were good.
“We’re throwing everything we can at this right now,” Lieutenant John Wilson of the Coast Guard told reporters.
Meanwhile, Coast Guard teams in Texas resumed their search for two Navy pilots whose airplane disappeared Wednesday afternoon while they were flying a training mission near Corpus Christi. Naval fight controllers lost contact with the plane at about 3:20 p.m. Wednesday, and have been combing a search area of 4,500 square miles.
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