Small plane crashes in Plymouth, Massachusetts pond, pilot killed. "We heard the plane stall."

A small plane crashed into a pond in Plymouth, Massachusetts Thursday morning, killing the pilot, police said. Authorities have identified the pilot as 81-year-old Richard Carrara of Kingston. 

It happened just after 7:30 a.m. in Curlew Pond, which is off Curlew Pond Road in Myles Standish State Park.

"We heard the plane stall. We thought we'd hear the engine re-start, but we didn't. That's when we knew that somebody was in trouble," said John McCarthy, who owns a campground nearby. He didn't know where the plane was going to end up.

"We expected to see it in the trees over there. I'm thinking he must have put down to try to at least keep it in the pond as having his best chance of coming out of it," he told WBZ-TV.

The fixed-wing, two-seat plane ended up upside down at the edge of the shore after the crash. Massachusetts State Police said the pilot was trapped inside.

McCarthy and his neighbors jumped in their cars and boats when they saw the plane sinking in the water.

"When I came down here it was nose down, tail up," he told WBZ. "A bunch of us worked together to try to move, flip, turn the plane to get the pilot out. It's a very bad situation to try to handle that."

John Gurney saw it all from his family's cabin and raced to get his kayak. Onlookers captured video of Gurney and others paddling to the plane.

"We all tried to drag the plane closer to shore where we could stand on the bottom," Gurney said. "We tried to right it, try to flip it over but unable, it was full of water."

They began slapping the side of the plane trying to get the pilot's attention, but Gurney says he was unresponsive. "You feel a little bit helpless, we couldn't find a handle for a door, we couldn't hear anything," Gurney said. "You know there is a guy in there, you want to get him out."

Gurney said his neighbors did all they could to try and save him. "It's a fabric type of a fuselage on the plane so we were able to try to cut through that to see if we could get in to get the guy, but that proved futile," Gurney said. 

McCarthy estimates the pilot was submerged for about 20 minutes. He was pulled out by the Plymouth County Dive Team and rushed to a hospital with what State Police said were "life-threatening" injuries. Plymouth Police later said he died.

"They came as quick as they could, it's a hard place to find out here," McCarthy said.

There's no word yet on what caused the crash. The Plymouth County District Attorney's Office, which is leading the investigation, said Carrara departed Plymouth Municipal Airport at 6:32 a.m. for Martha's Vineyard, and was trying to return to Plymouth when he crashed.

An oil spill prevention and response team was called in because some fuel from the plane was leaking into the pond.

Curlew Pond is a 46-acre pond in the northwest corner of Myles Standish State Park, according to the Department of Conservation and Recreation. The pond has as an average depth of 13 feet and a maximum depth of 33 feet. It's a few miles from Plymouth Municipal Airport.

Plymouth, Massachusetts is about 40 miles south of Boston.