A 74-year-old pilot killed in a plane crash in a La Jolla neighborhood last week was identified Monday by the Medical Examiner’s Office as a Carlsbad resident.
Michael Mehdi Salour died after his plane, a Cessna Centurion flying out of Buchanan Field Airport in Concord, crashed Wednesday night into an embankment near Caminito Claro, south of La Jolla Village Drive, the Medical Examiner’s Office said.
Salour, the plane’s registered owner, had logged more than 17,000 hours of flight time and earned multiple flying certifications, according to his website.
He was the only person inside the plane.
The plane crash was first reported around 9:30 p.m.
According to FlightAware, the plane had taken off from French Valley Airport, just north of Temecula, on Nov. 13 and landed in the Bay Area. On its return Wednesday from Northern California, the plane was diverted to Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport in Kearny Mesa due to bad weather, the Medical Examiner’s Office said.
The pilot made one attempt to land but failed.
Salour radioed SoCal Approach, the FAA air traffic controllers who handle airspace between airports, and said he was low on fuel.
Less than two minutes later, he said he was out of fuel and needed to land the six-seater plane. The controller tried to direct the pilot to a runway about 2 miles from his location. He never made it.
It took several hours for searchers to find the wreckage, hidden among brush and trees in the neighborhood. The plane came to rest a few yards from the backyards of a few homes.
An investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday that investigators had taken the aircraft back to a secure location. They would be working to determine what factors, including weather, the pilot’s credentials and the plane’s condition, may have played a role in the crash.
The NTSB’s preliminary report on the crash should be out in about two weeks. The final report will take 18 months or longer.
The biography page on Salour’s website states that he held degrees from multiple universities, including a doctorate in physics from Harvard University. He had founded and/or owned communications and technology companies, and had worked as a faculty member at multiple universities.
He held valid certificates as an airline transport pilot, flight engineer and flight instructor, according to an FAA database.
