Morris said a couple chartered the plane for an aerial tour of the city.
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The wreckage of a small plane that crashed Saturday night was discovered in a mud-bottomed New Orleans lake 24 miles wide and 40 miles long, authorities said Sunday morning. Edwin Holmes of the New Orleans Fire Department reported that divers had found the wreckage of the Cessna plane at about 6:30 p.m. close to the site of the initial crash site in the huge lake – only 1,000 feet from the runway it had been heading for at the airport.
Just before midnight on Saturday, four friends from Algiers who earlier finished dinner at the Lighthouse Bar and Grill on the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal had parked their truck along the lake and were shining a spotlight over the pitch-black water, hoping to help rescue boats and the chopper scan the surface to spot the missing men.
The airport director, Ben Morris, said Monday that the plane hit a rainstorm around the time of the crash.
Fire department officials say drivers will be sent down to the plane Tuesday to attach cables and cranes will lift the wreckage out of the water.
A Coast Guard Air Station New Orleans MH-65 Dolphin helicopter crew and a 29-foot Response Boat-Small crew from Coast Guard Station New Orleans have been doing search patterns in the area since the initial report of the crash.
“It’s a very sad thing, because she did tell us that she and her boyfriend were holding hands when she slipped out of the aircraft”, Morris said.
New Orleans Police Department spokeswoman Dawne Massey says one female passenger was picked up by a private yacht and transported to Ochsner Hospital.
The Federal Aviation Administration is looking into the cause. She did not know who owned the plane or how it had crashed.
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Preston said the Coast Guard had no time frame for potentially being called off the search effort for the two missing men.
