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Impromptu Plane Ride Ends Tragically

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By GEORGE H. NEWMAN

The Tampa Tribune

Published: June 14, 2008

PLANT CITY - It started with an Iowa tourist's wish to see Cedar Key from the air at night.

It ended with the airplane crashing into the Gulf of Mexico, killing all three people on board: the tourist, 47-year-old Julia Kelly; Plant City pilot Frank Gonzalez; and John Borchard, owner of a Dover produce company.

The death toll in the crash, just after midnight June 7, could have been higher.

When the 2004 Cessna 206 left Plant City Airport sometime after 7 p.m. June 6, there were six people on board: Gonzalez, 48; Borchard, 43; a newly married couple, Jacob, 23, and Melissa Raburn, 22; and another couple, Shane, 25, and Nikki Hinton, 23, Cedar Key officials said.

Borchard, who owned JMB Bros. Produce Co. in Dover, was taking the newlyweds to Cedar Key to celebrate their recent marriage.
Cedar Key police Chief Virgil Sandlin said there was a mixture of sadness and relief that more people weren't in the single-engine Cessna.

"If it was mechanical or equipment failure that brought this plane down, there could have been six people on board when the plane crashed," Sandlin said.

Josh Shackelford, a lineman at Plant City Airport, topped off the gas tanks on the Cessna before it took off.

"I just put 15 or 16 gallons in the plane," Shackelford said. "The plane holds almost 80 gallons. It was full of aviation fuel when they left."

Martin Pure, the owner and manager of Plant City Airport Services, said the flight from Plant City to Cedar Key would have taken about an hour.

Pure said the plane has a 400-mile range with a full tank.

The regular pilot used by Borchard, the Cessna's owner, was unavailable that day. Gonzalez, a certified pilot and part-time flight instructor at Plant City Airport, was flying in the area and "agreed to make the flight to Cedar Key," Pure said.

Shackelford said Gonzalez "was a good pilot. He did everything by the book."

Pure was awakened June 7 by officials from Cedar Key.

"I received a phone call at about 2 a.m.," Pure said. "I was asked to go to our airport and check to see if the Cessna had returned. I talked with authorities there several times during the night as the search was being carried out."

After the plane flew into Cedar Key, the Plant City group had a chance encounter with Kelly, her sons Jake and Luke, and her sister, Amy Davidson, 46, of Longboat Key, who were visiting the airport. The six from Plant City didn't have a car and asked for a ride to town to get something to eat.

Following the dinner at Frog's Landing, and then a stop at the Big Deck Raw Bar, the group returned to the airport. Once there, it was discovered that a camera belonging to one of the couples was missing, Sandlin said. Several people, including the young couples, backtracked to find the camera.

About the same time, Kelly said she wanted to see Cedar Key from the air at night, and she, Gonzalez and Borchard took off for what was supposed to be a 10- to 15-minute round-trip flight.

The plane went down in the Gulf of Mexico about one mile from the Cedar Key Airport. Sandlin said Davidson told officers she saw the lights of the aircraft over the water and then an orange glow where the lights had been.

In the confusion and uncertainty, Sandlin said the police weren't notified of the missing plane for another hour.

"You don't know what went through their minds," Sandlin said. "The last thing they would want to believe is that the plane went down."
Sandlin said the plane was submerged in 14 to 15 feet of water, near high tide.

"That portion of the Big Bend area is mostly muddy bottom," he said. "If the tides stir up the bottom silt, visibility isn't very good."

A fisherman found Borchard's body floating in the water about 16 hours after the crash, Sandlin said. Divers later found the bodies of Gonzalez and Kelly in the plane's fuselage in that vicinity.

"The diver told me the visibility was only one foot at the site of the wreckage," he said.
Sandlin wasn't sure why the plane crashed off Cedar Key, a coastal town in Levy County southwest of Gainesville. The Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board are investigating.

"The Air Force notified us that night they tracked a blip in the airspace offshore that showed a plane take off, ascend to 800 feet, make a turn to return toward shore and disappear off radar," he said.

Reporter George H. Newman can be reached at (813) 865-4451 or gnewman@tampatrib.com.

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