Photo Credit: Melissa Gaherty

A rescue team prepares to search the crash site

A single engine Beechcraft plane narrowly missed several populated office buildings and crashed into a lagoon in Redwood Shores at 11:53 am on Thursday morning.

Authorities have confirmed that a  woman was found dead just a few feet from the partially submerged aircraft. San Mateo county sheriff’s dive team pulled the woman’s body from the lagoon.

The SF Gate reports that Robert Borrman, the founder and owner of R.E. Borrmann’s Steel Co., was on the plane along with his pilot and the pilot’s girlfriend, according to Charlene Marshall, an employee of the company.

The aircraft departed San Carlos airport at 11:50 am.  The flight was bound for San Martin for an FAA inspection, about 60 miles south. Just three minutes after takeoff the plane rose upward and then banked in the water a short distance north of the airport.

NTSB investigators are on the scene. They plan to pull the plane from the water in the next 24 hours.

Officer Osborne from the police response team helped coordinate the emergency services, along with the sheriff’s department and divers from the search and rescue team.

According to Officer Osborne, “the three people involved in the plane crash were killed. Two unidentified males are still currently trapped inside [the plane] and the female’s body was recovered.”

Police are still “unsure if it was a mechanical or pilot error,” and are now “just waiting for the NTSB (National Transit Safety Board), from out of the area, to [finish their investigation on] who the people inside were.”

The twin-engine plane fell hard into the lagoon soon after taking off out of the from San Carlos airport.

“Some family members have called in, identifying who they believe the victims were,” Officer Osborne said.

A female eyewitness, who works in a cubical in the Marine Parkway, first heard the plane “smack into the lagoon,” and immediately “turned around and saw the plane nose down in the water, slowly sinking”. As she picked up the phone to call 911 she saw a bystander “swimming from the shore to help”. She was one of one hundred fifty 911-callers that witnessed the accident.