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.