He arrived around 6:30 a.m. on Sunday bearing the small gifts that the employees at a municipal Florida airport had come to expect from him. (On Christmas Eve, they were cookies.)
He also dropped off a flight plan that indicated he would take an approximately 45-minute flight to the Florida Keys for a family getaway before returning later in the day.
But shortly after taking off in dense fog near Tampa, the pilot, John H. Shannon, 70, and four others — including two of his daughters — were killed in a crash, the authorities said. The twin-engine plane burst into flames after going down at Bartow Municipal Airport in Polk County, Fla.
The Cessna aircraft took off despite thick fog that had settled over the airport shortly before sunrise and had limited visibility to less than one-fifth of a mile.
“No one should have attempted to take off in a small plane in that weather,” Grady Judd, the Polk County sheriff, said at a news conference on Sunday.
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An airport employee who was filming the fog on a cellphone recorded the sounds of the plane taking off and crashing, Sheriff Judd said. The fog was so thick that the plane could not be seen in the video, he said.
Also killed on Sunday were two of Mr. Shannon’s daughters, Olivia Shannon, 24, and Victoria Shannon Worthington, 26, as well as Ms. Worthington’s husband, Peter Worthington, 27. A family friend, Krista Clayton, 32, was also on board, the authorities said. The group had planned to eat lunch in Key West.
“It’s a tragedy of monumental proportions when it happens on Christmas Eve,” said Sheriff Judd, who said he had been friends with Mr. Shannon for years.
Mr. Shannon had been planning to take the trip from Lakeland, Fla., where he lived, to the Florida Keys with his daughters for the holidays, said John Liguori, a friend. Over coffee several days ago, Mr. Shannon told him he would depart on Christmas Eve or Christmas, depending on the weather.
“More than the flight, he was looking forward to spending time with his two girls and the husband of his daughter,” Mr. Liguori, a lawyer in Lakeland, said in a phone interview.
Ms. Worthington and her husband arrived on Friday from Baltimore, where they lived. She taught fourth-grade English at a public school in Baltimore, and Mr. Worthington attended law school. They were married in June, and her father’s Facebook profile photo shows him with his daughters at her wedding.