Plane crash in fog kills 5 on Christmas Eve

He arrived around 6:30 a.m. Sunday bearing the small gifts that employees at a municipal Florida airport had come to expect from him.

He also dropped off a flight plan that indicated he would take an approximately 45-min- ute flight to the Florida Keys for a family getaway.

But shortly after taking off in dense fog near Tampa, the pilot, John H. Shannon, 70, and four others — including two of his daughters — were killed in a crash, the authorities said. The twin-engine plane burst into flames after going down at Bartow Munic- ipal Airport in Polk County.

The Cessna aircraft took off despite thick fog that had set- tled over the airport shortly before sunrise and had limited visibility to less than onefifth of a mile.

“No one should have attempted to take off in a small plane in that weather,” Grady Judd, the Polk County sheriff, said at a news conference Sunday.

An airport employee who was filming the fog on a cellphone recorded the sounds of the plane taking off and crashing, Judd said. The fog was so thick that the plane could not be seen in the video, he said.

Also killed Sunday were two of Shannon’s daughters, Olivia Shannon, 24, and Victoria Shannon Worthington, 26, as well as Worthington’s husband, Peter Worthington, 27. A family friend, Krista Clayton, 32, was also on board, authorities said. The group had planned to lunch in Key West.