"C J Campbell" wrote in message
...
Still, if the pilot had any warning at all, he should have been able to
make
it to a relatively open area for an emergency landing. The trouble is, if
he
was only at 500' above Case Inlet, then he could have been below treetop
level on the shore, as the land rises steeply to 400' almost immediately.

As of last night's evening news, they were focusing on an oil slick not too
far from Olympia, in the same location where a couple of boaters say they
saw something sink (they thought it was a sail at the time).

Sounds to me like my original guess, based on the wife's comments, that the
pilot simply flew the plane into the water while hot-dogging or that he had
an engine failure at very low altitude, was most likely correct. If one
assumes the radar track was for the missing plane, the "flew the plane into
the water" theory is pretty plausible (since the oil slick is well past
where the plane went off radar).

Lots of assumptions, of course. Until they pull the plane up (they are
bringing sonar in today to search for it at that location), and determine
whether the engine was developing power at the time of the crash, we won't
know whether it was an engine failure or pilot error (though, to be so low
when the engine fails is pilot error too).

Pete