Plane will be raised today

Crews today plan to raise the wreckage of a small private plane that crashed off the coast of San Clemente Saturday afternoon, killing the pilot and three passengers, officials said.

The plane went down at 2:06 p.m. Saturday two miles off the coast and sank almost instantly in 200 feet of water.

Crews were expected to begin recovering the plane and the bodies of the victims at first light today. With assistance from deep-sea divers, a crane will lift the plane off the ocean floor. The wreckage will likely be hauled onto a barge and transported to shore, said Nicole Chandon, an air safety investigator with the National Transportation and Safety Board.

Pilot Dan Neuman and passengers Jason Baldwin, Jeff TenEyck and Rick Olavson were returning from Mexico, where they had been at the Baja 1000, an off-road racing event.

Authorities do not know what caused the crash, and Neuman’s friends and colleagues were equally puzzled. Witnesses reported seeing the plane spiraling nose-first into the ocean.

A plane can enter into a spin if the engine stalls out, but the spin can be corrected with a simple maneuver, said Reza Malek, a flight instructor at Royal Aviation flight school

Neuman was the chief flight instructor at Royal Aviation and also taught flying at Orange Coast College. He had 17 years of teaching experience.

“If you don’t know how to recover from a spin, it can be fatal,” Malek said. But if anyone knew how to get out of a spin, it was Neuman.

“We call him ‘Dan the Man.’ He knew everything about airplanes,” Malek said. “He would not get himself into that situation [a spin] in the first place.”

With Neuman at the helm, even a total engine failure wouldn’t send the plane down so suddenly, Malek said, adding that small planes can glide a certain distance without engine power.

“If the engine fails, it dies -- the plane doesn’t drop like a rock,” Malek said.

If Neuman knew the plane was going down, he would have aimed for the shore, said Malek. It is a cardinal rule of flight that it’s always better to put a plane down on land than on water.

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. It 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.

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

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.

Neuman was the Baldwin family’s long-time pilot and flew the family to the Baja 1000 race every year, said Rodney Foster, the department chairman of aviation pilot training at Orange Coast College.

Baldwin and several family members competed in the race Saturday, officials said. The Baldwin family was well known in the off-roading community.

Capt. Jim Wehan was piloting the tall ship Spirit of Dana Point Saturday afternoon when his crew and passengers saw the plane plunge into the ocean and sink almost instantly.

Wehan’s first mate, John Krause, first spotted the plane 400 feet above the ocean, tumbling down in a “twisting type of motion,” Wehan said.

No one heard any sound of an engine.

The plane hit hard and without a big splash. In seconds, the plane had entirely disappeared under the water, Wehan said.