Plane Carrying 10 Is Missing Near Peak

A chartered twin-engine aircraft carrying 10 people from Las Vegas to Orange County was reported missing Sunday, and authorities said it was last seen on radar flying near a peak south of Corona that towers nearly 2,000 feet above the plane’s reported altitude.

The identities of the pilot and nine passengers were withheld pending notification of relatives.

But a spokesman for the charter firm, Las Vegas Flyers, said the plane belonged to that company and the passengers were tourists who had decided to go to Disneyland for the day.

Both the Civil Air Patrol and the Federal Aviation Administration said the Cessna 402 took off from Las Vegas about 11 a.m. Sunday and was last reported at 12:07 p.m. on radar at an altitude of 2,100 feet, just a mile north of 4,007-foot Pleasants Peak on the Orange-Riverside county line.

“It just disappeared at that point from the radar screen,� said Lt. Col. Ed Crankshaw of the Civil Air Patrol.

Crankshaw said that all such aircraft are required to carry emergency radio signaling equipment that could tell searchers the location of a downed plane. But, he said, no signal had been received thus far from the missing plane.

Although both Crankshaw and spokesmen for the FAA said the plane may have landed at a small airport or landing strip without telephones and had not yet reported in, they said no area airports had reported the craft on the ground. An FAA aide at Ontario International Airport said it most likely had crashed.

According to its flight plan, the plane was due at John Wayne Airport at about 12:30 p.m.

Crankshaw said the CAP sent ground crews to the Pleasants Peak area and that a full-scale search, including CAP planes, would begin at daybreak.