The pilot who died after an ordeal last week over the Central Valley has been identified as a Santa Clara man.
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The Merced County sheriff’s office said Mahesh Chigurupati, 31, was the sole occupant of a single-engine Cessna that went down on Aug. 26 south of Los Banos.
Chigurupati had taken off from Reid-Hillview Airport, in San Jose, shortly after 3 p.m. that day. Less than an hour later, he made a distress call saying that the plane’s controls were not working.
For three hours, as his fuel level dropped, he flew an erratic path over Santa Nella and Los Banos, followed by another small plane whose pilot was reportedly attempting to give him support, radar tracking images show.
Around 7 p.m., Chigurupati’s plane crashed in a field near Interstate 5, and he was killed; nobody else was injured, the sheriff’s office said.
The National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration are investigating the accident, the sheriff’s office said.
Chigurupati’s online obituary says he grew up in Ohio, earned an engineering degree from Ohio State University and was working as an engineer at Nvidia.