PALO ALTO, Calif. — The founder of a steel company is believed to be one of three people dead in a plane crash in the Redwood Shores lagoon.
An employee at R.E. Borrmann’s Steel Co. in East Palo Alto said her boss, 92-year-old Robert Borrmann, was on board the aircraft along with a pilot and the pilot’s girlfriend.
Authorities pulled the body of an approximately 40-year-old woman from the water shortly after the plane crashed today, Redwood City Battalion Chief Dave Pucci said. Divers initially could not feel or see anyone else inside the plane, though reports from the San Carlos Airport indicated that there were one or two other people on board.
Several hours later, dive teams from the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office found the bodies of the other two men.
“The dive team went down and they did locate two more bodies,” Pucci said this afternoon. “They are unable to actually get them out because of the position of the aircraft to the bodies.”
The plane, headed for San Martin, Calif., in Santa Clara County, went down in the lagoon less than 30 seconds after it left the San Carlos Airport at 11:50 a.m., Pucci said.
FAA spokesman Lynn Lunsford said the plane was a 1961 twin-engine Beechcraft Queen Air, which could seat as many as eight to 10 passengers depending on the configuration of the seats.
Michael Phelan, who works in the Oracle complex next to the lagoon, said he was walking outside when the plane crashed. “First, I heard it. The engine sounded very loud and very bad,” he said. “You could tell then that something was wrong.”
Phelan said he saw the plane make a hard right turn and then drop nose down.
He expected to hear an explosion, Phelan said. Instead, he “saw a big mist” in the water.
Phelan said he pulled out his cell phone to alert authorities, but immediately heard sirens. Firefighters from the Redwood City and San Carlos-Belmont fire departments responded to the 11:53 a.m. call of a plane down.
“It was very disturbing,” Phelan said. “I never saw anything like it.”
The employee at R.E. Borrmann’s, who didn’t want her name used, said Borrmann had flown B-17s in World War II. His grew up working at his father’s steel company in San Francisco, she said, and he started his own in 1954.
Though he no longer had his pilot’s license, he still loved to fly with a pilot, she said.
“He came to work every single day even though he was of his age,” she said. “He came in every single day and he’d go in the shop and see what the guys were doing every single day. … He was never bothered by anything. He was such a good person.”
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