Missing pilot found dead in lake after taking off in homemade plane for solo flight

The body of a missing 73-year-old pilot has been found after his homemade Cassutt Racer vanished on a routine flight, with the wreckage discovered

The body of a missing pilot who vanished after taking off in a homemade plane has been found in a lake.

Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) in Canada has said 73-year-old David Douglas was confirmed dead on (August 18), after search crews located his small aircraft completely submerged in Wolf Lake in the Kawartha Lakes region, Ontario.

Douglas had taken off on Friday morning, (August 14), from Oshawa Executive Airport at around 8.30am for what should have been a routine one-hour leisure flight north. Family members raised the alarm when he failed to return by about 9.30am and reported both the plane and pilot missing.

Douglas was flying a blue-and-yellow, single-seat, amateur-built Cassutt Racer. It was a compact “Formula One” racing design originally created in the 1950s, with the letters “FOFZ” on its tail.

His family said he was an experienced leisure flyer who had been piloting for more than 50 years and regularly took the same route, making his disappearance all the more worrying, CTV News reported. A huge multi-agency search unfolded over four days.

On Monday, (August 17), teams from the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre found the first major clue when pieces of aircraft debris were spotted floating on Wolf Lake, located inside Queen Elizabeth II Wildlands Provincial Park. The following day, OPP divers and underwater recovery teams located the main body of the plane on the lakebed, People reported.

That’s when they found Douglas inside. Police reportedly offered condolences to the family and thanked local cottage owners who checked trail and security cameras for possible sightings.

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) has deployed a specialist team near Minden Hills to work alongside provincial police, recover the wreckage from the water and examine whether the aircraft suffered a mechanical failure, fuel issue, or whether other factors played a part. Douglas’ aircraft was reportedly classed as an amateur-built experimental plane.

These types of crafts are legal in Canada as long as they pass required safety inspections. Unlike a kit plane, builders typically buy the blueprints and craft the aircraft from raw materials.

The Cassutt Racer’s fuselage is formed from hand-cut and hand-welded 4130 tubular steel, creating an extremely tight cockpit frame about 16 inches wide.

Though such planes can look tiny and minimalist compared with commercial aircraft – with a wingspan of about 15 feet and a length of roughly 16 feet – they are built using genuine aviation-grade steel and wood.

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