Pilot says plane crash into California ocean was no stunt

The Pilot of a small plane that went down in the waters off Northern California is a self-professed thrill-seeker whose stunts have sometimes gotten him into scrapes.

But David Lesh says anyone who thinks he deliberately ditched a plane he only recently bought for $200,000 must have "lost their mind." He also said he had airplane insurance.

Lesh says bad gasoline may have caused the single-engine Cessna to lose power Tuesday over Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco. He set it down and it sank within a minute.

Lesh recorded himself standing on the wing and in the water with his passenger before his Coast Guard rescue.

KTVU-TV says Lesh was ticketed in 2014 for chasing a moose he was filming in Colorado and was arrested in Boulder after burning shopping carts for a video.

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